08-28-2024, 01:04 PM | #1 |
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Apple lays off employees working on Books and News
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024...ooks-and-news/
A shame. I imagine it probably doesn't impact too many people on MobileRead with all our dedicate e-readers, but I know a number of people whose primary reader is their iPad. It would be a bummer if Apple Books fell by the wayside. Last edited by Cactus Chef; 08-28-2024 at 01:04 PM. Reason: Reduce repetition of the word 'shame' |
08-28-2024, 01:49 PM | #2 |
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The Apple Books app is terrible. I only use it when I'm forced to.
We use Apple News, but there is so much about I dislike. I love having access to all the magazines, but reading news stories is frustrating. We pay extra for News, but are still subjected to multiple ads per story, some of which are auto-playing video ads. And it is extremely left-leaning. Last edited by Deskisamess; 08-28-2024 at 01:52 PM. |
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08-28-2024, 03:26 PM | #3 | ||
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08-28-2024, 03:52 PM | #4 |
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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. Last edited by tomsem; 08-28-2024 at 03:56 PM. |
08-28-2024, 03:53 PM | #5 |
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I'd be very happy to see Books go. I'd also be very happy for apple to drop eBooks.
It's Apple's fault that eBooks are more expensive then they used to be. |
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08-28-2024, 03:56 PM | #6 | |
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Last edited by Frogm4n; 08-29-2024 at 08:32 PM. |
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08-28-2024, 04:30 PM | #7 | |
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Nobody is forced to pay $20 (or more) for a new release. I certainly don't. My average purchase is about $3.50. That's a lot less than I was paying for print books, even used ones. |
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08-28-2024, 04:35 PM | #8 | |
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08-28-2024, 04:52 PM | #9 | |
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Apple wanted to have fixed set of prices like they did for MP3's. $12.99, $9.99 etc. when they launched iBooks for iPad. $12.99 was still a lot less than new release pricing for hardbacks at that time. They didn't really know what they were doing (and still don't, when it comes to ebooks). Publishers went along with it at first, they didn't know what they were doing either, but were hoping for some competition with Amazon and ebooks were still kinda a new thing. It wasn't long before they decided that neither model suited them and that they didn't want any constraints on pricing. |
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08-28-2024, 05:04 PM | #10 | |
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Last edited by John F; 08-28-2024 at 05:06 PM. |
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08-28-2024, 05:13 PM | #11 |
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Yeah that too. Both things are true. But DOJ should not have bothered, the market took care of it. But like the other parties, they didn't know what they were doing either.
Last edited by tomsem; 08-28-2024 at 05:16 PM. |
08-28-2024, 09:22 PM | #12 | |
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08-29-2024, 06:44 AM | #13 | |||
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For example, looks at the timelines of fictionwise and the Apple/publishers collusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictionwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...v._Apple_(2012) Quote:
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08-29-2024, 06:50 AM | #14 |
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I use the Books app a lot, for PDFs. It's my primary means of reading PDFs, and probably one of the main uses of my iPad at the moment.
I guess I don't mind that it also handles epubs, but I'm not at all interested in buying books from Apple. They are the only vendor whose books I can read on no other hardware (as far as I'm aware). I have never knowingly opened the News app. |
08-29-2024, 08:37 AM | #15 | |
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When Apple got involved, they wanted to take down Amazon and got the major publishers involved. Apple thought that if prices remained the same with no discounts or sales by the stores that we would not care where we purchased eBook and leave Amazon. All that ended up doing was taking down the online stores who's business relied on sales and discounts. As it is, prices on eBooks went up and have stayed up. Prices are near the same price for the pBook and sometimes more expensive. Sometimes when the pBooks comes out in paperback after the hardcover, the price of the eBook does not go down like it should. If Apple had not rallied the publishers to try to screw over Amazon, eBooks would be cheaper and we'd have more stores to choose where we buy from. |
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