iBookstore Now Live in 26 More Countries

29.09.2011 Nate Hoffelder 2 Comments

click to enlarge

Liz Castro got a tip yesterday afternoon that all of a sudden, publishers and authors had more options for selling their ebooks in iBooks. In addition to US, UK, France, Germany, Australia, and Canada, where you could already sell an ebook, Apple have also added 26 more countries as new markets:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Replublic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portgal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Yep, they added a lot of Europe to the list, which makes me wonder why Apple didn’t just enable an option for the EU as a whole. That would have been so much simpler. Apple is also not making it easy to add the new markets; each has to be added individually and you have to set the retail price one market at a time. In any case, the iBookstore is now up to 31 countries supported, and that’s a paltry sum when compared to Kindle Store (150+) or Kobo (everywhere).

Liz has also gotten feed back from a number of publishers, and most are a little frustrated with the new system.

Also it would be nice to be able to choose Greek as the language of your ebook since it’s in Greek and it going to be sold in the Greek iBookstore.

and

Between their near non existent help from iBooks itunes connect when a book is not accepted, to adding territory by territory for sale. iBooks is about as pleasant to work with as a proctology exam. (or so I hear.)

Apple launched iBooks with the iPad back in January 2010, and it has taken them 20months to add parts of Europe as market options. Hmm. In case it wasn’t c;ear already Apple aren’t going to put any major effort into iBooks. They are far behind Kobo and Amazon and it looks like they are content to stay there.

—
For more ebook news, subscribe to the RSS feed or the daily email newsletter.