Earlier today Apple enabled iBooks gifting. It's been a long time coming. Steve Jobs introduced the iBookstore alongside the original iPad in 2010, and it's taken until well after the 5th generation, iPad Air, shipped in 2013 for gifting to become available. I was ecstatic at first, because I'd been "forced" to use Amazon's Kindle service to gift ebooks until now. Finally, I thought, I could gift iBooks. But I thought too soon. Apple and iTunes, I quickly remembered, only allows gifting to someone who uses the same regional account you do. So, for example, I can only gift an iBook - or iTunes song or movie or App Store app or whatever - from the iTunes Canada store my account is in, to someone who also uses the iTunes Canada store. That eliminates a ton of my friends who just happen to live in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere. Amazon, by contrast, not only lets me use my Amazon.ca account to login to Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.uk, but it lets me gift Kindle books, send gift certificates, and even order real material goods, for friends in those countries. In this increasingly important way, Amazon is absolutely pantsing Apple and iTunes.
Content deals are hard. International content deals are even harder. I can't even imagine how hard cross-national content deals are. But this simply truth remains - if I want to send an ebook to a friend of my, even one that lives in south bay, I have to use Amazon and their Kindle service, because iTunes simply can't or won't do it.
I realize some people simply get U.S. accounts, but a) with the way iTunes currently works, I'd have to get an account in every store I'd ever want to gift someone from. Worse, when you switch iTunes accounts, you're locked to that account for 90 days. (I've been unable to use iTunes Match for periods of over 3 months thanks to that.) Far worse, the U.S. account we used for iMore (so I could gift readers) is currently frozen due to international activity for reasons they're "not allowed" to elaborate on.
I also realize some people just as simply get VPNs so they can spoof U.S. IP addresses to avoid just the kind of problems I had above. But the point is, this shouldn't be my - or any customer's - problem to solve. It should be Apple's. It should "just work" so I can gift anyone, using any iTunes, iBooks, or App Store any content that's available in that store.
Apple is lightyears behind Amazon in many ways. There's still no Amazon MP3 or Video or much of any digital media content at all in Canada, and the Kindle Fire here remains an expensive (30% higher than U.S. sticker price) Kindle + Android app player. Yet I can open up Amazon.com and send a friend a gift certificate, an ebook, or an app, or any number of other things without any trouble at all.
Why can't I do that with iTunes?
