Hours after Jobs announced at Apple Expo in Paris that the iBook had started shipping to dealers in the United States, a salesman at Apple's online store told MacWEEK that iBooks did, in fact, start shipping to those customers who placed the earliest orders.
"First in, first out," the salesman said, adding that orders placed Wednesday at the Apple Store won't be fulfilled until late October.
Mac wholesale distributor Ingram Micro Inc. will start shipping the machines to retailers by Friday, according to Kelly Johnson, business unit director for Ingram's Mac division. "We will really start to ship next week," Johnson said, and the retail channel should be stocked by the weekend of Sept. 25.
160,000 advance orders
Jobs said iBook shipments to European retailers would follow a few weeks behind the U.S. product rollout.
Daniel Drew Turner contributed to this report.
Six weeks after the July Expo, at the Seybold publishing show in San Francisco, Jobs announced that Apple had received 140,000 advance orders for the iBook. By Wednesday, at Paris' Apple Expo, Jobs said that number had risen to 160,000.
