Haikasoru eBooks Out NOW
Over the past day or so, several anime news sites (such as ANN & Japanator) have been reporting the story about Viz Media bringing their Haikasoru literature line to Apple's iBook store eBook format. Unfortunately they don't seem to be doing enough research on the story. While true that Viz posted the initial announcement on the Haikasoru blog just late last week & promised that their first three eBooks would be out "within weeks," all three- Harmony, Next Continent, & Slum Online- have been available in the iBook store since at least Wednesday. No one else seems to realize this yet for some reason.
So despite popular belief & what others may have you believe, you can get all three of Haikasoru's inaugural eBooks right now- as long as you have an iPad or an iOS4 iPhone/iPod Touch. & like most eBooks, you can download them for cheaper than the cost of the physical versions of the novels. Slum Online is avaialable for $7.99 (216 pages), Harmony for $8.99 (256 pages), & the Next Continent for $9.99 (424 pages). Free samples are available for all of them as well. Viz mentioned that they hope to get not only more books in eBook format (& hopefully they'll do manga one day too), but also have them available for more devices, such as Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook. For now though, just get an iPad.