[tomsem]

Oh come on. The price-fixing thing is very old news, it should not be cited as a reason for cutbacks now.

Clearly services revenue growth is tied to subscriptions, not book sales, but again that does not explain cutbacks now.

Book sales are not reported/broken out, so my working assumption is that they are flat, and perhaps outstrip expectations that may have been set awhile ago (during expansive COVID period when they were madly hiring people). Apple barely promotes Books at all.

Apple Books app is virtually the only reading app that has full Accessibility support. Kindle does pretty well, but fails to highlight text as it is read out (yes they updated to add 'assistive reading' that does this, AKA TTS, but it does not work smoothly - Speak Screen still works better last time I checked).

Even apart from that, where it shines, I do not agree that it is 'terrible'. I don't read many books with it but have no need to do so (given I don't purchase from Apple). It is nothing special but I prefer it to (say) Kobo, Nook, Play Books. It's very easy to import 3rd party content that syncs across Apple devices. But I guess we will never see Books on the web.