More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Apple iBook store to be US only? All mention of iBooks vanishes from Australian site
January 28, 2010 | 2:36 pm
|
By Paul Biba
TUAW is reporting that the Apple Australia site has a footnote in its discussion of the iPad saying that iBooks will be available in the US only.
So I went to the Australian site to find the image that TUAW showed, above, and guess what? There is no mention that I can find of iBooks on the site at all. Not in the Features, Design, App Store or Gallery sections at all. No disclaimer, even. If you were in Australia you would have no idea that the iPad does books. The US site has a huge iBooks picture, with text, on the Features section of the site site. The Australian site has his feature completely deleted.
Any of our overseas readers want to take a look at the Features section of their local Apple iPad site and see if its there.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
No need to go ‘overseas’…same thing for Canada.
It’s not mentioned on the UK site either. On the features page, it’s just missing.
I suspect this is because Apple doesn’t want to get sued for advertising something it can’t guarantee to deliver. It doesn’t have any agreements with publishers outside the US yet.
I’m sure they’re working hard on it now that the iPad’s been announced.
It is very true as I searched for more info I went to the .com site there it is the ibook feature. If this is designed to take on the kindle where are the books! Also there is no mention of the price of any potential books, they want us to buy into the hype and sign up to purchase yet don’t fully spell out what it can do….. I wonder
Hi Paul: yesterday, I tweeted on @pontolit: Apple iPad: “iBooks available in the U.S. only”. BAD! VERY BAD! (http://twitter.com/Pontolit/status/8295792198)
If you go to http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/, you’ll read at the bottom of the page “iBooks available in the U.S. only. Some features and applications are not available in all areas. Application availability and pricing are subject to change.”
We hope so.
Best,
CS
Could be USA philanthropy. They don’t want people from other countries to buy stuff, saving them money!
Same here in Germany. Well, still got my Kindle …
There are international book trade agreements that have to be reached. There is licensing that has to be worked out between countries. It was this way when iTunes started up with music licensing. It’ll happen, it just takes time.
The Australian Publishers Association say it’s simply a matter of time to negotiate rights and several local publishers are talking to Apple at the moment:
http://tinyurl.com/y98r578
Really, it’s exactly the same as it was when iTunes Music Store opened, it was many months (as I recall it was about 18 months in fact) before it opened in Australia (and many other nations) due to rights negotiations with foreign music labels. Same again when movies and TV shows went on sale in the US iTunes store, we here in Australia didn’t get them for many months. Lots of lawyers, lots of agents, it all takes time.
We may not live long enough for the Australian Publishers Assocation to ever get anything done though – barring lobby the government for welfare.
While we wait you would think they could atleast offer public domain works on the upad. ABWA has talking books which will play on it as well.
Same here in Portugal.
Publishers in Australia are terrible. They already put up a fight with paper books, often going to the (idiotic) expense of re-printing books in Australia rather than importing them from USA or UK, and thereby setting back release dates by months. Seems like if you’re not J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown you can’t get anything published worldwide these days.
What I don’t understand though is this would be a HUGE market for the publishers to open up. Book sales (like newspaper and magazine sales) have been in decline over the past decade, and yet they are hemming and hawing over legal documents? What a joke. If they won’t sign with the iBookstore, I’ll get the Kindle app and use Amazon.