Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon
I tend to agree with MP that Apple's behavior points toward their not really caring about ebooks. And I suspect that Apple is correctly reading their market.
<snip>
So I suspect that it really doesn't make much difference to Apple, nor probably to Amazon or Kobo or anyone else, if the customer has to go to an internet browser to purchase ebooks.
|
Well, the real problem is that Apple is caught between two of it's own philosophies here. On one side, they want the accounting to be simple and fair. Everyone who plays on the store is subject to the same cut. On the other, they don't want to encourage loopholes in their policies.
Apple takes 30% of app sales. Free apps are not subject to this (30% of 0 is 0). However, how about that app that is free but uses micro transactions or ads to profit? Should Apple be denied a cut for hosting the app just because the developer wants to profit differently? So take a cut from the in-app purchases, and provide iAds to encourage devs by giving them a bigger cut of the ad revenue.
Now, how about the app that is free, but uses an in-app purchase to go from a trial-like mode to a full version? How do I block them from bypassing the normal 30% cut? Make the in-app purchases 30% as well.
In the end you can follow this down to the more unreasonable conclusion that all sales of any digital content through the app itself are subject to the 30% cut. Even if I'm trying to create a "fair" ecosystem, I can easily wind up with a system that is unfair to a group of developers on the platform.
And for those people saying HTML5 is a double-edged sword... you have to remember Apple itself said that web apps were the "SDK" for the first iPhone. I can't imagine that they really care a ton about the HTML5 stuff as long as the app store keeps operating break even or better. Really, I think this is more of a case of trying to take "fairness" and "simplicity" to an unreasonable extreme. Sure as a developer I can remember Apple's rules for revenue sharing off the top of my head, but digital content middlemen such as Kobo/Sony/Amazon/etc are the ones feeling the squeeze. Publishers themselves aren't, app developers aren't. But that's possibly a problem all on its own, as middlemen happen to help standardize industries a little bit for us sometimes, like with eBooks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
This HTML5 doesn't sound very secure. Will this be another virus entry point?
|
No more than browsers are already. HTML5 builds on existing technologies that browsers already use, and add a few more that don't inherently have any extra access to the system. Chrome, Firefox, IE9, Safari, and probably a couple more already have some level of HTML5 support.
The big deal is that HTML5 provides local (sandboxed) storage for web apps, and richer features that give it some capabilities of Flash.