If you opened the iBookstore this morning, you might have noticed that two big publishers jumped on board: O’Reilly Media and Microsoft Press books are available for sale in the iBooks app for iPads and iPhones. Actually, Microsoft Press books are distributed and sold by O’Reilly, so that would make one huge publisher with nearly 800 titles on sale in the iBookstore.
The great news is, there’s no DRM on O’Reilly’s ebooks: every standard EPUB reader device will be able to open and display the books just fine. The bad news: sale is limited to US and Canada. The publisher is considering distribution in other countries that have access to the iBookstore.
O’Reilly’s Andrew Savikas also points out that, given iBook’s lack of support for ebook updates, each title includes information on how to update through oreilly.com for $4.99.