Apple adds gifting options to the iBookstore
If it's digital books your family and friends love to read, Apple has a gift for them and for you. After long being the company's sole online store without gifting options, the iBookstore now allows you to send ebooks to your friends and family.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's iBookstore, which since its 2010 launch has let authors sell directly, had been the company's lone online store with no way to give a purchase to someone else — an odd gap during a season when Apple was otherwise leaning hard on gifting, from variable-cost iTunes gift cards at third-party retailers to Passbook gift card integration in the Apple Store app.
The move closes a gap Amazon opened more than three years earlier, when it let shoppers gift a Kindle book to any e-mail address in November 2010. The pickup across eight outlets including Engadget and Gigaom suggests the omission itself had become a story by December 2013.
First-order effects
- Holiday buyers can now send an ebook directly through the iBookstore instead of defaulting to a general-purpose iTunes gift card, putting the recipient one tap inside Apple's book ecosystem.
- Publishers and self-serving authors on the iBookstore gain a seasonal impulse channel that until now existed only on rival stores.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's Kindle store loses one of its clearest differentiators over Apple's book business, pushing competition onto price and catalog rather than checkout features.
- Gift-card intermediaries — retailers selling variable-cost iTunes cards — face a substitute product for the specific use case of giving a single title.
Third-order effects
- If gifting becomes table stakes across all major content storefronts, differentiation shifts to what happens after the gift lands — which ecosystem the recipient is nudged to adopt for future reading.
The trend: Digital media stores are converging on feature parity in commerce mechanics like gifting, three years after Amazon set the bar and Apple closed the last visible gap among the major platforms.