Australians can now use ther iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch as a serious e-book reader after Apple opened the doors to its iBookstore today via iBookstore Australia Launch: iBookstore Opens In Australia | Apple.
This is what Asher Moses wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald of 3 November 2010. What a dumb statement!
I am Australian. I own an iPod Touch and I have been reading books (seriously) on it for some time now via the Amazon’s Kindle application – an application that is portable across my non-Apple PC, and my non-Apple smartpone as well as the iPod Touch.
The rest of the article goes on to sing the praises of the local service where again, it seems, that Australians will be forced to pay a premium on books – e-books in this case. I suspect this is the industry “protecting” the Australian literary e-industry from nasty foreign incursions and the devastation of competing openly.
Moses notes, on prices, that
Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books cost $12.99 each on the iBookstore, compared to $US8.99 on the US version of the iBookstore and $US8.59 on Amazon’s Kindle.
At $4.50 a book difference between iBookstore Oz and Amazon … well, you don’t need to be a brain scientist to work that one out. Hell, I’d like to know with an e-book store how the iBookstore Oz can mark-up the price 45% above the US iBookstore price.
I think I’ll keep using Amazon’s Kindle software at the moment – Kindle and Calibre – my two e-book friends.
