meltonibooks Self-publishing author Henry Melton has posted to his blog about the process of uploading EPUB books into the iBookstore. He notes that the terms of the contract apparently prevent him from discussing it in detail (not surprising given Apple’s penchant for secrecy in other contracts; it took a Freedom Of Information Request to NASA to reveal the terms of Apple’s app development contract since the first rule of App Club is you don’t talk about App Club), but talks about the basic process.

iTunes Connect is pretty much a support-free environment.  You supply your own verified ePub files and fill out the forms with the ISBN numbers, blurb copy, etc.  This is all done through a Mac application, which handles some error checking and then uploads the bundle to the big Apple shaped cloud in the network somewhere.  After a processing time, it appears in the iBookstore, as shown in the image.

He notes that there is no way to get URLs for the store yet, and only the iPad can access it at the moment. He also discusses the necessity of making sure iTunes or Calibre haven’t stuck extra files into the EPUB zip before uploading.

One interesting note is that Melton was able to mark the books to be DRM-free, which means that once you sync them into iTunes you should be able to copy them out into Calibre or load them into Stanza or your other preferred EPUB reader.

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