Almost 800 of these books have gone onto the store today. Best of all they don’t have any DRM and are standard ePub files, so they can be read on any device with ePub support.
From the press release:
The more than 600 titles in the iBookstore from O’Reilly include Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks, David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual, J.D. Biersdorfer’s iPad: The Missing Manual, and Mark Pilgrim’s HTML5: Up and Running.
Almost 150 Microsoft Press titles are also available, including Steve McConnell’s Code Complete, Second Edition, Ed Bott’s Microsoft Office 2010 Inside Out, and William R. Stanek’s Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant.
“Ebooks are already a big part of our publishing business, and we know many of those ebooks are read on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Having those ebooks available for sale in the iBookstore makes it even easier to find, buy, and read nearly 800 O’Reilly and Microsoft Press titles on these iOS devices,” said Andrew Savikas, VP, Digital Initiatives, O’Reilly Media.
Added Savikas: “As always, there’s no DRM on ebooks sold by O’Reilly, so it’s easy to read the open-standard ePub files purchased from the iBookstore on nearly any device with ePub support.” …
For now, the availability of O’Reilly and Microsoft Press titles is limited to the US and Canada iBookstore. However, “our intention is to make the full catalog of titles from O’Reilly, Microsoft Press, and all of our digital distribution clients available in every territory with an iBookstore,” added Savikas.
The O’Reilly Radar blog gives some more detail: Several titles that in print form included supplemental material on CD or DVD are being repackaged to more clearly indicate where that supplemental material can be found for ebook customers, and those titles will be added to the iBookstore gradually in the coming weeks. … Unfortunately, for now iBooks does not support updates for ebooks, but each title includes information about how to upgrade your iBookstore purchase with oreilly.com for $4.95 to get access to additional DRM-free formats and free lifetime updates.
