That's the part I don't understand. Kobo, Amazon even B&N sell most everything in Canada... what's so unique about iBooks that they can't sell here?
It just seems odd, to the point of being ridiculous, that on Apple's device, in Canada, we can purchase books from everyone except Apple.
None of the others seem to need whatever extra (false) reassurance the changes to digital copyright law currently being debated provides. I doubt that's the reason for Apple's hold-up.
Imagine Amazon selling the Kindle in Canada but having no books available for purchase? Anyway I look at this, it's pretty poor customer support to the many people unwilling to go through the hassle of opening a second, US, iTunes account... and I suspect that's the vast majority of iPad purchasers in Canada.
You'd think that at the very least Apple would have stated in a prominent way that those wishing to buy the iPad in Canada would need to wait a while for full iBooks support. I wonder how many people just assumed it would be fully functional before they bought it?
Maybe the publishers are insisting that they duplicate the same price gouging they engage in with printed books by charging the customary +33% in the Canadian iBooks store
(for those of you who don't know, book publishers assume the exchange rate to be whatever the least favorable to us has been in the past three decades and mark it up by that amount... to add insult to injury, they print both the US and Canadian prices on the book jacket so we can easily see the extent of the gouge.)