[pwalker8]

Now that Apple has rolled out the new operating system and the new ebook store is fully up and running, I thought I would revisit this with my impressions of the Apple book store as well as other thoughts.

By an interesting coincidence, tor send out their news letter today with a couple of interesting articles, the first was an article on what the author considered the 10 best completed SF&F series. Given that it's a tor newsletter, it's heavily weighted towards Tor authors and series with similar styles as the Tor style. (Just as a comment, if the author considers Glen Cook a lesser known SF&F author and has Harry Potter and LOTR at the bottom of the list, then we likely have very different taste) The other was 17 fall books we cannot wait for. Once again, heavily weighted towards Tor authors.

The Tor news letter is something that I really wish all the imprints would do. Hey, I'm a reader who buys lots and lots of books. Let me know about your books and authors, both new and backlist. I can't say that there are a lot of Tor authors that I really like a lot, but there are a couple. How expensive can it be to put out something like this?

Ok, my impressions of the Apple ebook store. My initial impression is I'm impressed. It's very similar to the Apple music store and movie/tv store. Lot's of curated lists, best seller lists and related books lists. It definite appeals to the way that I approach book buying.

One nice feature is they have what they call free series starters, a bunch of free first of the series books, including several that I had actually heard of (Basilisk Station, the first Honor Harrington book for example[and yes, I know that it's been in Baen's free Library for ages]). Also a lot I had never heard of. This is a situation where cover art makes a difference. If it's got a cover that looks like a Romance book, the odds are pretty good that it's a urban fantasy/romance book.

The various books that I checked in the curated lists also had books in the series (if it's a series) as well as related books (i.e. Amazon's if you like this, you might like one of these other books). Most of the time where I was familiar with the initial book and books in the related books list, the suggestions seemed reasonable.

The other thing is they seem to have a much better selection that they use to. I went ahead and got a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser omnibus by Fritz Leiber and the Legends of Camber of Culdi Trilogy omnibus by Katherine Kurtz, both put out by Open Road.

All in all, I think that this is good competition for Amazon. I'm certainly going to start using the Apple bookstore as a tool. While Apple's FairPlay DRM is more cumbersome to remove, I can do it, so I'm not worried about losing access to these books or format shifting the books if I want to read them on my Kobo as well as my iPad.