Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Apple has - and always has had - pretty much the best ePub 3 reader around in the form of their "iBooks" app in terms of compliance to the ePub 3 standard. The issues are that there's no official way to copy files from an iPad or iPhone (you can copy content to it, but not from it), and the fact that they use their own DRM mechanism.
Of course, none of that is any different to Amazon selling content to read on a Kindle. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of people buy content from their reader supplier to read on that device; people like us who want to buy from one supplier and read on another are in the minority.
So no, I really can't agree with you that it's a "mess".
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Apple's business model is fairly similar to Amazon's business model, i.e. lock you into their ecosystem. For a large portion of the reading public, that's fine.
Right now, as far as I can tell, Apple's targeted book audience are iDevice owners who are casual readers who mostly read best seller type books. Until Marvin came around, I used iBooks a lot. It's not bad, it just doesn't handle large libraries well, their targeted audience rarely has more than a handful of books at a time.
I'm not surprised that Apple is making a ebook push at this time for a number of reasons. I suspect there will be less legal roadblocks in their way this time. I hope it works for them. Some legit competition might push Amazon to improve ebook store a bit. They have been coasting on the ebook front for a number of years. If both Kobo and Apple make a major push, then it's all good for the consumers as a whole.
I seriously doubt that I will buy much from the Apple bookstore. I'm simply not part of their targeted audience. I'll probably install the beta on one of my devices just to see what it's like though.