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Apple Updates iBooks with Paid Japanese Books, Greater Asian Language Support

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Apple today updated iBooks to version 3.1, bringing new support for paid books in Japan and enhanced support for Asian languages.

What's New in Version 3.1

The iBookstore in Japan now has hundreds of thousands of books available for purchase, including fiction,
manga, light novels and more. This version of iBooks also includes a number of improvements for reading
Asian language books.

ibooks_paid_japan
iBooks is a free download from the App Store. [Direct Link]

Top Rated Comments

172 months ago
Buy direct from Japan

I've got a question for those in the know. Is Apple building an iBookstore where people anywhere can buy ebooks from any country? It would certainly be simpler for the Japanese iBookstore handle all the Japanese language titles but sell to people anywhere.

I'm sure there may be rights issues, but that could be worked around if the publisher has the rights in both countries. And it'd be great if iBooks knew how to find and buy books from all the countries where's there's a store.

Books shouldn't be bound by borders.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ChristianVirtual Avatar
172 months ago
Books shouldn't be bound by borders.

Books shouldn't be, music and movies too. But they are. At least with Kindle I still can buy English books also while beeing in Japan. The border-thinking makes digital content for me difficult to fully adopt. As much as I would like to.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
a0me Avatar
172 months ago
And yet I had to buy the Kindle version of Steve Jobs because the Japanese iTunes store only sells the Japanese version. (Amazon and the Kindle store sells both the original and the Japanese translation)

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And yet they still display the date in the USA format. :rolleyes:
The screenshots is taken with the US settings.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
172 months ago
I like how the pic is One Piece!

Love that manga!!!
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
172 months ago
And yet they still display the date in the USA format. :rolleyes:

Couldn't possibly be because that iPad is set to English language mode :rolleyes:
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Yvan256 Avatar
172 months ago
And yet they still display the date in the USA format. :rolleyes:
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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