I Wish Apple Loved Books

[pata]

I Wish Apple Loved Books

There's an old joke, "how do you know when your friend is a Vegan."

"Don't worry," the answer goes, "they'll tell you."

The same is true about Apple and projects they are passionate about.
Listen to Jony Ive describe the Apple Watch and you know he loves traditional time pieces and was passionate about improving the experience. Look at the Health Kit team and you know they care about improving lives with this device. You've got a team involved in imagining what this device can become...

You might like or hate what Apple has done with music but from programming and content, to software, to Air Pod headphones that you can control from your watch - Apple clearly has a passion for music...

I've joked that if Eddie Cue loved reading the way he clearly loves music, then iBooks, the iBookstore, and iBooks Author would be amazing. Not only aren't they amazing, they aren't even good...

I was an early embracer and adopter of iBooks Author. I could produce beautiful books. The software was initially frustrating but they improved it in significant ways early.

Then they stopped...

OK, so iBooks Author is essentially abandonware, what about iBooks and the iBookstore.

I left the iBookstore a year ago and have recently come back.

I left because I wanted to update my book from the iBook format to epub and Apple wouldn't let me offer it as a free update to my readers...

So I started selling "A Swift Kickstart" as an epub on Gum Road.
When I sell a book I get an immediate notice. When I want to update a book, I send an email to my readers and they know they can go get a fresh copy. When a reader has an issue, I can often resolve it for them. I can sell into every country I want to and if there's something I need to correct in my book, I just upload a new version.

Oh iBooks.

Yesterday, I uploaded my latest version of my book to Gum Road and to iBooks. Within minutes I was getting email notifications of sales of my book on Gum Road.

An hour later my book was approved for sale on iBooks. This is remarkably quick. It used to take days. I looked online and my book wasn't on the iBookstore yet. Also, my name was still listed incorrectly.

Sigh...

[pwalker8]

Losing a few hundred million to a government lawsuit will put a damper on the love.

[ZodWallop]

Well, when your lord-on-high says "People don't read anymore", you can't expect too much from their bookstore.

[johnnyb]

It really is a pity! I enjoy using their software, also a lot for books I bought elsewhere, and I really wish they would add a couple of features to iBooks. The cloud feature is godsend for reading on iPad and reviewing on Mac but the typography concept is limited and does not play well with many epub styles. I wish they would add basic typography settings, a couple of spacing options for lines and margins... That would be a good start!

[Tarana]

I could never get my text to speech app to work with anything on ibooks, so never bothered getting anything but free books from it.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Well, when your lord-on-high says "People don't read anymore", you can't expect too much from their bookstore.

They were actually very gung ho over ebooks for a while.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

They were actually very gung ho over ebooks for a while.

I was just being a smartass

I'd love it if Apple would sell DRM free books that could be downloaded in the format of your choosing, similar to the way they sell music. It'll take a big company to push for a change like that and Amazon sure won't do it.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I'd love it if Apple would sell DRM free books that could be downloaded in the format of your choosing, similar to the way they sell music. It'll take a big company to push for a change like that and Amazon sure won't do it.

Some of their books are DRM-free (I've downloaded the ePub's with iTunes for Windows), but I'm not aware of a way to tell that ahead of time.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I was just being a smartass

I'd love it if Apple would sell DRM free books that could be downloaded in the format of your choosing, similar to the way they sell music. It'll take a big company to push for a change like that and Amazon sure won't do it.

If you look how the DRM was dropped from music, basically Apple with iTunes was in the same place that Amazon is in for ebooks now, i.e. 80+ percent of the market. So the music publishers wanted to push people to Amazon in order to create some sort of competition to Apple. The carrot they offered was no DRM.

To get rid of DRM, the publishers have to buy in. To a certain extent, the Apple iBook was suppose to be competition for Amazon, but Amazon successfully blocked that move via federal lawsuit against Apple and the publishers. Now, we are in a situation where there is sufficient start up cost as to discourage anyone from entering the market in a meaningful way. I'm not sure that simply removing the DRM will move the needle much.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

If you look how the DRM was dropped from music, basically Apple with iTunes was in the same place that Amazon is in for ebooks now, i.e. 80+ percent of the market. So the music publishers wanted to push people to Amazon in order to create some sort of competition to Apple. The carrot they offered was no DRM.

To get rid of DRM, the publishers have to buy in. To a certain extent, the Apple iBook was suppose to be competition for Amazon, but Amazon successfully blocked that move via federal lawsuit against Apple and the publishers. Now, we are in a situation where there is sufficient start up cost as to discourage anyone from entering the market in a meaningful way. I'm not sure that simply removing the DRM will move the needle much.

The 'no DRM' (or social DRM/watermarking*) would also be tied to allowing different formats, ePub or Mobi. This would allow customers to purchase the book from Apple and read it on any device they owned: phone, tablet, e-reader or laptop. That could pull in folks like me that don't own an Apple device at all.

It wouldn't need to be Apple. Google could do it instead. It just has to be a company with enough weight to counter Amazon.

For serious readers, it would be a blessing.

But I'm realistic enough to acknowledge that books just aren't as popular as music and from what I've seen, publishers are even further behind the times than music executives.

(*Please don't start the 'watermarking is/is not DRM argument. It's tiresome.)

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

The 'no DRM' (or social DRM/watermarking*) would also be tied to allowing different formats, ePub or Mobi. This would allow customers to purchase the book from Apple and read it on any device they owned: phone, tablet, e-reader or laptop. That could pull in folks like me that don't own an Apple device at all.

It wouldn't need to be Apple. Google could do it instead. It just has to be a company with enough weight to counter Amazon.

For serious readers, it would be a blessing.

But I'm realistic enough to acknowledge that books just aren't as popular as music and from what I've seen, publishers are even further behind the times than music executives.

(*Please don't start the 'watermarking is/is not DRM argument. It's tiresome.)

preaching to the choir. Competition is good all the way around. It helps with price and won't let a company coast. Google went through a big law suit as well when they were trying to do their "scan every book" project which is why it morphed into a search engine rather than a serious ebook store. Lawsuits are a great way to suppress competition. Perhaps we may see some competition once ebooks gets to a big enough percentage of the market share.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

preaching to the choir.

I agree with everything you said, but:

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Google went through a big law suit as well when they were trying to do their "scan every book" project which is why it morphed into a search engine rather than a serious ebook store.

Wasn't it always intended to be a search engine? Surely if all they wanted was to open an e-book store, scanning every book wouldn't be required.

[DiapDealer]

Not to mention that Google has a pretty serious ebook store in addition to the archive project. They never had any intention of selling copies of copyrighted books they were scanning. That would be silly. No lawyer could have spun that into a legal venture. It was always an archival/search project.

[gweeks]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Not to mention that Google has a pretty serious ebook store in addition to the archive project. They never had any intention of selling copies of copyrighted books they were scanning. That would be silly. No lawyer could have spun that into a legal venture. It was always an archival/search project.

Right up until the Authors Guild sued them. The first settlement agreement would have given Google rights to sell anything they wanted to after scanning it. That over broad settlement was rightly thrown out by the judge.

Greg

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by gweeks

Right up until the Authors Guild sued them. The first settlement agreement would have given Google rights to sell anything they wanted to after scanning it. That over broad settlement was rightly thrown out by the judge.

Greg

Regardless of what any agreement may have been interpreted as giving them (Google) the right to do, no one with any sense believed that Google was ever intending to sell copyrighted works that they didn't hold the rights to sell. The AG was being paranoid. I suppose it's a good thing that a judge clarified things later, but the AG's lawsuit was always a tempest in a teapot. Google was creating a archive/search project and the AG panicked over perceived infringement. The ultimate takeaway from any lawsuit, in my opinion, was that it was deemed that Google wasn't violating copyright with their scanning project. Anyone who believes Google was ever intending to "stock" an ebook store with what would have amounted to stolen books isn't thinking very clearly.