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This is a great thread! Incredibly informative, even if speculative.
Now, given what Amazon has done to MacMillan-- dropping all its books, hard copy and ebook, in a big power play, distributor-publisher spat--how likely is it that Amazon would even permit Stanza to run on the iPad? Perhaps it will pull Stanza from both the iPad and the other i-devices.
Of course, Amazon is said to be more interested in selling books than Kindles... in which case, it would want to make sure Stanza can run on the iPads and make Apple look bad if Apple even thinks of blocking it (think of Apple's foot-dragging on Google Voice that got the feds involved).
But how will this all work? Apple is rumored to want a wide open pricing market for ebooks, not a fixed price (odd considering its iTunes history, but understandable given the publishers' desire to circumvent Amazon's $9.99 fixed price). If books are going to sell for more via the iBooks book store, then how will Apple permit other apps to run that can fetch the books at cheaper prices from Amazon and fictionwise?
Or does Apple want to leave it all open, too-- and it's the publishers who then say to Amazon and fictionwise-- sorry, we're only going to make our ebooks available at a certain price-- that of the iBooks store-- so Amazon if you want to play, you'll have to change your pricing!
I think this last scenario might be the one that plays out... it assumes that Apple is more interested in selling iPad then ebooks, but then again I know little about such matters and haven't even thought enough about it to make an informed judgment. What are your more informed judgments?
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