I've been reading about the new Apple subscription deal - the one where Apple requires all publishers (newspapers, magazines, books) to sell from within their app, at which point Apple takes a 30% cut on the sale.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/15/app...subscriptions/
Money quote:
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Update: A couple more things. Apparently, Apple has just updated the App Store Guidelines alongside the announcement today. And yes, it seems that one-time in-app purchases like those made through Amazon for the Kindle will fall under the same rules. That brings up another question: could Amazon just make a Kindle reader app that didn’t allow you to buy anywhere in the app, but only use previously bought content? The guideline wording seems like it would still be a no-no but it’s not entire clear that such an app would be rejected.
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Soooo...it looks like Apple wants 30% of that payment you just made to Amazon for the ebook version of
Theodore Rex. Which is probably all of everybody's profit on the sale. Because, like a good ebook consumer, you downloaded the Amazon sample, fired up your iPad, and at the end of the sample, clicked "Buy Now."
What this seems to me to be aimed at is to drive ebooks off the iPhone/iPad platform, leaving iBooks as the dominant commercial ebook store in the Apple ecosystem.
Am I missing something here?