O’Reilly Media, Microsoft Press Titles Join iBookstore

Apple just took a huge step forward in its quest to compete effectively in the e-book market. It was announced today that O’Reilly Media and Microsoft Press will begin offering select e-book titles through Apple’s iBookstore. One of the early criticisms of iBooks had been its weak e-book offerings when compared to those available for Amazon’s Kindle. Today’s news is definitely big for Apple, and will help them compete with Amazon. Sebastopol, California-based O’Reilly has been publishing technology books since 1978. Among the e-books now available in the iBookstore are: Hackers, iPad: The Missing Manual, and Office 2010: The Missing Manual. Some 600 titles are now available from O’Reilly.

Microsoft Press is sporting 150 titles in the iBookstore. These are being made available since Microsoft Press books are sold and distributed by O’Reilly. In a blog post, Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media notes:

Having those ebooks available for sale in the iBookstore makes it even easier to find, buy, and read hundreds of O'Reilly and Microsoft Press titles on iOS devices. As always, there's no DRM on ebooks sold by O'Reilly, so it's easy to read the open-standard EPUB files purchased from the iBookstore on nearly any device with EPUB support.

You can check out the new e-book offerings in the iBookstore today using the iBooks app, which is available for the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad.

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