With some much valued quiet time over the Memorial Day weekend, I decided to stock up my Kindle with a few new e-books. On my laptop, I tooled over to the Kindle books site, and started rooting around for some candidates. Took a peek at the top sellers, checked in with the Science Fiction and Fantasy list, looked to a couple of old familiar authors, and finally settled on some fresh faces. Kameron Hurley and Ian Hocking if you must know.
All in all, I probably spent about an hour on a full-featured computer, researching and selecting three items. Just for grins I decided to see if the iBookstore had my titles, maybe at a reduced price. They’ve gotta have a site on the Web right?
Wrong!
Straight from the official Apple iBooks FAQ (as of May 30, 2011):
Can I purchase a book from the iBookstore using my computer?
“No, the iBookstore is only available through iBooks on a compatible iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch at this time.”
Criminy! You can’t even use the execrable iTunes on the desktop to buy iBooks.
I’m pretty much convinced that the type of background work I did is not really feasible on a current mobile device. And I think this effort may be typical of serious book purchasers. Ergo, Apple is severely limiting the market of iBooks customers. About the only reason I could see buying a book in the iBookstore is as an impulse purchase, where I just want to get an author or title fast. I couldn’t really imagine building a collection through my iPhone, even with such a nice reader interface.
Game, set, match, Amazon.
Apropos Elle Driver. I’ve always liked that word… “execrable”… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.