Quote:
Originally Posted by fbrII
Which cheek did you tattoo your Apple logo to? Not that it matters, just curious.
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Ignoring the rather childish insult, perhaps you have misunderstood my point.
Apple's change is a negative for ebook readers, and for ebook stores.
I don't disagree with that, and I don't think I ever have.
It is not however the end of the world, it will (has) not caused the other ebook stores to desert the iOS platform, nor will it cause more than a tiny amount of inconvenience to users. Rather than clicking the Store button in the Kindle app, you go to Safari and browse to amazon.com. That is the extent of the change to the user experience.
So yes, a negative; no, not a major one, and certainly not one that is going to cause the downfall of Apple, or cause Amazon et al to cut their noses off to spite their faces and pull their apps from the iPad.
Secondly, I personally think people have a vastly overinflated view of the importance of ebooks to Apple, and are mistaken if they think that ebooks are what caused the change to Apple's subscription policies. (They are called
subscription policies. You don't subscribe to ebooks, you do to magazines and newspapers.)
Apple knew that none of the ebook stores would possibly agree to the 30% in-app purchase charge (and indeed they would have been completely stuck if one of them had done, as they simply aren't set up to handle the size of in-app library that the ebook stores would need).
What happened is exactly what was predicted several months ago, that Apple would relax the rules enough to allow Amazon et al to stay on, and nothing would really change.
Amazon want to be on the iPad, Apple want them to be there. Kicking Amazon off might sell more iBooks, but it would sell less iPads, and the first is irrelevant in comparison to the other. I'll just repeat the revenue figures again. Last quarter Apple made more than four times as much revenue from selling new iPads as it made from selling all content to all existing iOS devices. Plus they actually make significant profit on hardware, while iTunes runs at just over breakeven.[0]
Thirdly, I don't understand the idea that what Kobo have announced is some world-shattering thing that will bring Apple to its knees. They might do a web-app. So what? It will almost certainly provide a worse user experience than a real app would, and what benefit does it provide to users? Not having to switch to another window to buy a book. Big deal.
0: I can't find a quote from the 2011 figures, but from the 2010 investors call:
Quote:
Maynard Um–UBS
We have seen a number of industry revenue forecasts for applications and just given kind of the expected explosive growth there I am just wondering if that is still a break-evenish type of business as you look forward over the next couple of years?…
[Apple CFO] Peter Oppenheimer
…Regarding the App Store and the iTunes stores, we are running those a bit over break even and that hasn’t changed. We are very excited to be providing our developers with a fabulous opportunity and we think that is helping us a lot with the iPhone and the iPod touch platform.
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