http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01apple.html?_r=1&hpw
Interesting. I don't believe self-publishers would be affected, but if your e-publisher doesn't push to all platforms, then it could potentially affect your sales.
Well, no, not so much. First, the NYT is misrepresenting things a bit, out of ignorance, I think, second, it's interesting that neither Apple nor Sony are quoted.
1. Apple makes money via the App store. It's a business--and a store. They can sell whatever they want, or refuse to sell whatever they want.
2. This is not new. Current apps, like Kindle, do not allow users to buy directly from within the app--they get sent to a Web browser. That makes it very clear that Apple isn't the merchant responsible for returns, etc. It also means that the Amazon doesn't pay Apple a cut of proceeds, also not a bad thing for users.
3. Apple isn't stopping Kindle or Barnes and Noble or Amazon or Borders from providing their readers to users via the App store; they're just saying "no" to implementing purchases from within that app. This makes good business sense to me. You don't see Wallmart stores with a Kmart kiosk inside them--because they are direct competitors.
There's a different take on things in
this piece.
Now, what I'd like to see is more people getting agitated about the non-policy policy regarding book returns from Apple's iBooks store.
If you download a badly made book--i.e. with unreadable unproofed text (let's just ignore the problems with the content issue regarding returned books) you may or may not be given credit for the book.
There is currently no way to simply download a corrected version, either--and many publishers are genuinely trying to replace badly made books.
eReader used to simply offer you a refund, or alert you to the availability of a new, corrected version--they seem to have stopped doing that, as far as I can tell.
