Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Languages Not Yet Supported in Apple iBookstore

The iBookstore Formatting Guidelines of September, 2014 lists books in these languages as not yet eligible for distribution:  Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Burmese, Persian/Farsi, Hebrew, Khmer, Lao, Malay (Jawi/Arabic), Sinhala, Tamil, Urdu.

My guess that that Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian, Malay, and Urdu are excluded because the iBooks app does not yet support the right-to-left page turning they require.  Burmese and Lao could be because proper line breaking is not possible.

From a separate list of "supported" languages it appears that in addition no books in other Indic scripts are currently accepted -- Devanagari, Gujarati, Bangla, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Telugu.

It's not clear why Indic scripts and Amharic are not accepted.  As far as I know Pages and iBooks Author support composing in them, and the iBooks app can display them OK.

Edit 3/20/15:  I have evidence that at least one Devanagari book has been accepted in the iBookstore.

Edit 12/17:  The 2017 edition of the Formatting Guidelines does not change list of unsupported languages.

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