How long before iBooks’ selection matches that of the Kindle store? Well, it could be a while, as Amazon spends all of the time and effort that they spend to format eBooks for the Kindle Store.

This question was posed on Quora, a new social networking site for questions, and Guido Bartolucci, a former engineer at Amazon had a good answer.

Here is an excerpt: “There are lots of published books where either the publisher doesn’t have an electronic version of the book anymore or the printer made significant changes to the text before publishing. There are a surprisingly large number of these books, even recent ones. Amazon spends a lot of time and money to convert popular titles in this category to ebooks themselves (it’s much more involved than just simple OCR). That’s partially why Amazon is so far ahead of everyone else, no one else is willing to pay for the conversion.” We’ll have to wait and see if Apple will take this approach.

New to Quora? GalleyCat explains how it works: “The site links to your Twitter or Facebook accounts, letting you interact with your friends while asking and answering questions. We recommend new users start with the Books, Bookstores, Libraries,  Publishing, Self-Publishing or Creative Writing topics as they explore the rapidly growing site. Below, we’ve linked to five simple ways authors and publishers are using Quora.”