Up until July 1st, Canada Day ironically (aka Dominion Day for all you anti-conformists out there), the Apple iBookstore was available for download in Canada, but the selection of books was limited to free classic ebooks in the public domain.
Now, several major publishers are selling titles in Canada on the iBookstore, including Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.
Simon and Schuster has ebooks from authors like Stephen King, Jodi Picoult, Robin Sharma, Kathy Reichs, and Cassandra Clare.
Titles from HarperCollins include Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes and Any Known Blood; Tish Cohen’s The Truth about Delilah Blue; Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s Debt-Free Forever; a special edition of Katherine Govier’s The Ghost Brush; General Rick Hillier’s A Soldier First; Theo Fleury’s Playing with Fire and Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s Secret Daught.
The ebooks generally run between $12 and $18. Some initial reports from Canadians suggest that the same exact books cost less on the Kindle iPad app. If you live in Canada and have an Apple iPad handy, please post a comment to confirm or condemn any pricing difference between Kindle books and iBooks.
Like anything, always good to compare prices before buying. Kobobooks is often cheaper (and many times has the exclusive Canadian rights), but they charge sales tax and the Kindle store does not.
I haven’t bought anything from the iBookstore yet (selection is still quite limited), but Apple does charge sales tax on apps (but not on movie rentals).
What I’m looking forwards to are ebooks in French. I thought since Hachette was in the mix, the iBookstore would have plenty. But I haven’t seen any.
As you know, Amazon’s Kindle store assumes all books are English and Kobobooks is based in Toronto, so all their books are English only. La Hutte offers French language books to Canadians, but the iOS app only works on iPads (books are all in pdf format).