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The idea of Apple achieving world domination of ebook publishing with iBA seems pretty ludicrous at this point, not only because of the licence agreement, which has most serious publishers scared out of their wits, but also because the feature set is pretty limited. Apple described the program as a "Garage Band for ebooks," and that's basically what it is: a cool but simplistic program for people to play around with publishing. I'm sure some serious musicians go into the studio with Garage Band, but it hasn't exactly put guitars and pianos out of business. Apple's just taking advantage of a huge hole in the ebook software market between the expensive and overly-complicated Indesign and the free but half-baked Sigil. Indesign CS6 will be out in a few months, and unless Adobe seriously screws it up, will remain much more appealing to publishers than iBA. Amazon's been aggressively trying to take publishers out of the picture entirely, while Apple is taking a middle position: publishers can stay in the game if they play by Apple's rules. At the same time, they are following Amazon in trying to lure authors directly.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft put some ebook functionality into MSWord in the future, or Google with Google Docs. The epub format is not all that complicated. Any program that can make an html file can do most of the work necessary to make an epub. Did Apple really add that much to the ebook picture with iBA? Quizzes? A Glossary? A movie at the beginning of the book? 3D objects? Isn't all of this possible in epub 3? The bottom line is that Apple is once again taking advantage of the inability of a group of competing interests (publishing industry, software companies, and schools) to get their shit together, and using that as a a way to sell a few more ipads and macs. It looks to me like a short-term advantage.
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