Quote:
Originally Posted by Kolenka
With Apple in the mix as host/retailer of the app, you get a weird scenario like this: Publisher -> Retailer (Kobo/Sony/Amazon/B&N) -> Retailer (Apple). This isn't exactly a sane arrangement, considering the sort of cuts that Kobo and the like get. Retailers as middlemen make for poor business.
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But this is exactly where the problem is. Kobo and the like don't get amazing cuts anymore. Because of the deal that Apple made with the publishers everybody gets 30% from the price of the ebook. When Apple decided to charge 30% of the price of every book sold through an app, it effectively cut all revenue going to kobo, amazon, b&n.
I understand that adding links to the chain means that everybody makes less money on a sale, but Apple could have simply refused to allow retailers to sell books through apps since the beginning. Now the same retailers have been going on zero revenues from these sales for a couple of months while hastily making preparations to move to web apps. The retailers like iflow couldn't cope with it because they didn't have other sources of revenue so they closed.
I can tell that you understand this, but you choose to say that Apple asks for a cut, when, in fact, it asks for ALL the revenue of the book retailers.