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So I suppose they felt they needed to get into the iBookstore after all (I assume that's the next announcement we'll be hearing from Apple). Too bad.
I don't really understand the mindshare that iBookstore seems to command from publishers and press. If Amazon has, say, 65% of the US market, and B&N 20% (shaving a little from their self-proclaimed estimates), there's no way Apple has even 10%. And with the end of Apple's virtual tablet monopoly this year, there's no way it is going to grow much from there. Yet publishers seem to hope that Apple is going to save their bacon.
From a consumer perspective, iBookstore is the worst value proposition out there: you can read content only on iOS, and only in the iBooks app (except for non DRMed material), it is a vastly inferior storefront to browse in (you can't even access the catalog or purchase with a computer browser), they have non standard features in their implementation of ePub standard, making authoring content more complicated, and it has this stupid agency model that eliminates competitive pricing.
Sorry if this seems a little off-topic, but in my mind Agency Model would not exist if it were not for Apple's collusion.
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