Yeah. It's a real problem. I've been reading ebooks on my PDA/phone for 11 years now and I've been sticking with the original Palm eReader format (http://www.ereader.com/) while I wait for the format wars to work themselves out. Newsgroups related to ereader/fictionwise have been buzzing for ages about how more and more titles are becoming locked to US-only downloads.
Apparently it's an issue with the publishers and not the retailers. Publishing houses and authors often negotiate different distribution arrangements in different parts of the world (e.g. an author using a different publisher in different parts of the world) so a particular ebook retailer's agreement with a particular publisher might only give it the rights to a particular book for US sales.
This is where I'm really hoping that the might of Apple will sort this out since presumably they have for more resources to go out and acquire the rights to more than just US distribution. This could be a case where a bit of Apple bullying and arrogance could really be in the interest of the consumer if Apple could bludgeon authors and publishers into offering global distribution rights in return for being hosted on the iBook store. Unfortunately the iBooks store doesn't have the clout of iTunes (yet?) and they are still locked in a battle with Kindle right now so I'm not sure that enough of the power lies with Apple vs. the publishers and authors at the moment but this will be interesting to watch.
I strongly suspect that, for legal reasons, the local iBook stores will be filtered according to publishing rights so, even if the US iBook store was up to a million titles by 28th May, that wouldn't mean a UK buyer like me has access to that catalog but will instead have access to only those titles where Apple has the UK rights which I suspect for the most part will be a fairly limited subset of the US catalog.
- Julian
