Thread: Why Apples iBookstore has so few titles!
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Old 05-04-2011, 04:37 PM   #2
kjk
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sassanik View Post
Why iBookstore has so few ebooks?

I think I may have discovered the reason that the iBookstore has so few ebooks!

In my quest to increase distribution of eStar Books (insert shameless plug for my website here) I signed up with Apple to sell ebooks through their iBookstore.

I got approved after waiting a few days and set about to upload our ebooks.

They require that they be epub formatted and pass a validation check. No problem there, all our ebooks come in epub format already.

First snag… you can't just "upload" the ebooks, you have to run them through a iTunes Producer program. No problem, I download the iTunes Producer program and attempt to install it.

Next snag… the program is for Mac's. Oh well I think, they probably have a PC version. I look through their support pages and it turns out they do NOT have a PC version.

Now this could be solved relatively easy if I actually owned a Mac. However I do not. It's not that I do not like Mac's, they are fine machines, it’s the cost difference. Quite frankly PC's are much cheaper.

So Apples webpage suggests that I go through an Apple approved Aggregator. The recommended list includes: Ingram (who charges a fee and takes a cut), Inscribe Digital (who also charges a fee and takes a cut), Libre Digital (have not found out if they have a fee yet) and Smashwords.

It seems to me the iBookstore is making the process more difficult than it could and should be, which could be why the iBookstore has so few titles.

Amy
Yeah, and it feels even smaller because its so difficult to browse/navigate/find stuff.

More to your point though, I think its because Apple seems at least for now to be catering to the big publishers, and not really doing much to encourage independent writers/small publishers. You'd think some of the recent success stories in the news about self-published authors and the like would change that-but I don't know if they get it/are interested in it.
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