[fjtorres]

Lurk mode off:

Let's try it again.
As Mr Goyal correctly pointed out, Apple is undercutting the public good that was *supposed* to arise from a uniform ebook specification.

Again: this is not about Apple being good or evil. What they are doing is what the environment and the rules of the game *allow* them to do. What any other for-profit corporation in their position would do if they could get away with it.

As much as I agree with Mr Goyal, where we differ is in our expectation of success for the Apple format. I'm not sure ignoring their behavior will suffice because the market will not be ignoring the product of this fork. Apple iOS hardware is a big lever to promote their products regardless of the merit of the products.

The issue here is ebooks as a *commercial* product and what the market for commercial ebooks will be like. And the fact is that because of the failure of the <idpf> to address the full delivery process of commercial ebooks, down to consumer level, and to establish *binding* control of their spec, the door is now wide open for commercial ventures to exploit all the work that has gone into defining and developing that spec, not to promote interoperability and transportability, but to advance their own interests. And those interests lie in fragmenting the market, minimizing interoperability and transportability, and marginalizing the generic, interoperable, product.

I think commercial ebooks are headed towards balkanization. We've been on the road from the beginning but the road is now a freeway; free and clear with no checkpoints ahead.

What Apple is doing has a good chance to become the norm for many other players in the ebook market the world over: Exploit the existing spec and tools, modified to render them purposefully useless outside your own products, and then sell the result as a different, more "innovative" platform.

I'm not sure what recourse exists *now*, after the fact.

The time to act was at the spec's launch or even before; wrap the spec in meaningful licensing to ensure that product of all the hard work served its intended goals of interoperability rather than be "adapted" to undercut those very goals. For an organization dealing with intellectual property they paid singularly little attention to their own output. That is one thing the Open Source software community has always kept front and center with their various licenses, ensuring their output is *not* used to subvert *their* goals, whether they be modestly communitarian or Stallman-nesquely revolutionary.

Essentially, the <idpf> has been relying on the honor system to (cheaply) police their specification. And they have been warned. They just chose not to act. The least they could do was the most that they would do. (A logo program! Wheee!)

But ebooks are big money and where there is big money there is little room for honor. Once one "gentleman" breaks the agreement, the rest will feel free to ignore it. And ignore it they will; there is a lot of good work in the spec and in the implementations out there. Most of it up from grabs for commercialization. Never mind Apple; do mind all those that will follow in their footsteps.

It's a new ball-game now, people.
Moving forward it's all about the Tag forks, the CSS forks, and the proprietary embeds and wrappers to come. Spec validation and interoperability are out,; brick-walled gardens are the order of the day.

Why not? There is money to be made and nobody to nay-say it.