RE: Apple iTunes vs. Apple iBookstore

Do people buy there? Yes. How well you sell will depend on everything from genre to pure luck. Do you want to deal with them? Your call, but I'll warn you that it's a pain in the backside, and Apple shows NO signs of fixing what's wrong with their system.
iTunes Producer (and Apple in general) is the most backward system you will ever have to deal with, as a content provider. It's friendly enough for their end consumers, but not for us. 
Examples? They keep changing their specs for books uploaded. They keep changing their iTunes Producer software (and there is no...ZILCH...support for that program, at least that I've found...their own tech staff said they knew nothing about the software to help me with it when I was getting a non-specific error from it). Worse, as they update the iTP software, they make it so that it won't work with older OS versions and force you to keep updating your OS to stay even with what iTP will work with. I've already been forced into a PAID update of OS just to keep loading books.
Beyond that, their iTP interface is crap. You're already accustomed to loading to B&N, Amazon, and other sellers, so you'll understand how horrific Apple's system is by the following descriptions. 
They don't have a simple click to sell worldwide. You have to choose each individual country from the list, one by one. 
They don't do what Amazon and B&N do and allow you to enter one sale price (usually US) and then have them base all other countries on that price, doing the currency conversions for you. Nope. You have to do your own currency conversions, enter each individual price to be associated with each individual country (keeping in mind that Apple requires set points that are above or below the actual currency conversion, so if you come in at 2.79, you may have to change it to 2.99...and with the non-Euro European countries, it's sometimes oddities like setting the price at 12.00 or 16.00). 
And, unlike Amazon, they don't automatically add countries to your distribution, since you've clicked worldwide distribution. That is probably a no-brainer, since they don't do currency conversion for you, but even when they added more countries from the European Union, they didn't simply make them available at the price you'd already set for France and Germany (the first two Euro countries they had aboard). Nope. They want you to go back into every book singly and add all new countries and conversions to them, pulling you away from your daily work to do catch up their own system COULD do for you. That's not a big deal if you have a dozen books, but try doing it with 600 or more books and tell me how completely UNFRIENDLY to the content providers this entire system is. 
Not to mention the glitches in the software itself... Don't get me started. If I have embedded a font in the file. I really don't care for a book to be bounced, just because they don't "like" the font. I have license to use it and have embedded it. Why should I have to reformat a book for them and make the interior presentation not match the cover, just because Apple doesn't want to accept it? Everyone else accepts the same exact ePub file. 

I think you have a mistaken idea about one thing though. I don't own an iPad, but people who do tell me they find my books on iBookstore, though they are loaded via iTunes Producer. I don't think this is an either/or situation as you're envisioning.
Brenna








From what I can tell one can set up an account through Apple's iTunes store

and upload epub files.  But to include your title in Apple's iBookstore you

have to provide a proprietary formatted file.



All of our titles are published as epub files.  Due to time constraints

I've chosen to only deal with that format for now.  So my question is this:

Are people buying e-books through iTunes?



Has anyone ever distributed their titles through both iTunes and

iBookstore?  Is anyone selling through iTunes and find it worth their while?







   		 	   		  

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