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iBook Avaliability
- Thread starter Scotty476
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Nope. But all you have to do is go to Amazon. If there is a Kindle version flip a coin. Heads: iBooks probably has it; Tails: It does not. Odds of this method working are 50/50, but be assured iBooks is missing a lot of current books thanks to friendly publishers.
I think I read somewhere that there are apparently about 60k+ books in the iBooks catalog (though you can only see them on iPad). Though frankly, I haven't been lucky finding the ones I wanted. Here is hoping that the situation is going to improve over time. However, in the meantime, the Amazon Kindle app for iPad isn't really bad. I ended getting some books this way, even though my preferred option would be to get them through iBooks. However, the Amazon Kindle app also allows you to read the books on your Mac (just in case this may be handy).
I have yet to do a search in iBooks that doesn't come up with empty results. I've pretty much given up and just shop at the Kindle store for books.
I haven't bought a book through the iBooks store.
Apple doesn't appear to be putting a lot of effort into the iBooks Store. When it was first launched there were many titles without proper formatting (I have a couple of sample books that way). They seem to have just pulled them instead of correcting.
There is no way that this is true. Apple wants a piece of the digital book revenue pie, and they are looking to grow this market. Of course, early on in the process there are going to be glitches. But over time the store will become more and more robust, and will eventually be a viable competitor to amazon.
I too noticed this. Many of Frank Herbert's books were pulled a week or so after launch because of incorrect formatting and have never returned. Very frustrating.
So does Apple have plans to expand the ibookstore to Mac/iphone users or is this something that will just be available to ipad users?
When they previewed iPhone OS4 they announced that the iBook app would be coming with it.
I think this highlights the problem with digital books... Amazon's store has over 500k books and it's still not that hard for an avid reader to find something they want that isn't available... There are a lot of books out there, and a lot more being published every year. After going to an independent bookstore in San Francisco on Saturday and making a note of a handful of books I'd like to read, there's already more than one as I look the list up in the Kindle store, that isn't available. And these are all new books from reasonably large publishers.
On the flip side, over the course of a year, probably 90% of the books I've wanted to read have been available, running average.
Most of the science fiction books I'd like to read are not on iBooks nor Kindle.
I don't care about Oprah and Vampires, so the iBook store has been useless to me so far.
I don't know how much it helps, but when I look them up on Amazon, I do try to click the "I want this on Kindle" button... a lot of this is the publishers... barring publishers wanting special treatment, Amazon and Apple aren't really turning them away or rejecting books, AFAIK.
I realize that (and I click that link too). Then you have publishers like Tor that are greedy and want to charge over $12 or more for very old Asimov novels that should be $6 or so.
Publishers have been crying how print media is in trouble, and then turn around and shoot themselves in the other foot. I have my wallet in hand, but am only interested in what's fair.
This. I can understand (But not sympathise very much) with them not wanting to canabilise sales of harcovers but selling stuff double the price of a mass market copy just encourages people to pirate.
We're not talking about hardcover sales here. These are old paperbacks.
Publishers need to get out of the hardcover sales mentality if they want to survive. I really have no sympathy for the print media industry. They've all got their heads stuck where the sun doesn't shine (and I'm not talking about sand). They need to join the 21st century and adapt their business model to suit.
I click on the "I want this on Kindle" button all the time.
I will say that on a number of occasions I have been quite disappointed with the the books whose content was converted to a Kindle format. The graphs and diagrams in the technical or financial books I came across ranged from completely illegible to the ones that were legible through the "try squinting your eyes and see if that helps" technique.
I click on the "I want this on Kindle" button all the time.
Yeah, I'm not so convinced about the iPad as a book reader, but I can see pretty immediately that it's going to be head and shoulders better than the Kindle for those books. Hopefully the next few years will be really exciting, as it seems like there's a critical mass for people to start developing their technical books for the digital format.