ZDNET: Apple sabotaging ePub?

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by kartu

When Microsoft tried to "enhance" Java, it ended up in court and that cost Microsoft about 1 billion $.

Embrace a standard that doesn't belong to you, create incompatible "enhanced" version of it, give it out for free / little money, then dominate the market is very old.

Yeah, but this isn't what's happening here. There is no "standard" that they are embracing. These books aren't epubs, don't claim to be epubs, have the extension .ibook, and can only be used on an iPad.

[ucfgrad93]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Unfortunately, though, we're never going to convince the "Apple are the spawn of Satan" crowd of this.

Pretty much.

[leebase]

Originally Posted by tompe

Well, people like to use just one tool. So people will start to write ordinary books in iBooks Author also. They will not be aware of the Eula.

Sure, people want their cake and eat it too. If someone wants a "one tool for all platforms"...then the iBooks Author is not for them...just as you don't code in Visual Basic if you want to reach other platforms outside of Microsoft Windows.

Lee

[speakingtohe]

To me the danger is not in the software itself or the limitations to it's users, or even the threat to existing standards.
The danger lies in the fact that Apple will most likely take legal steps to stop other companies from developing similar software on other platforms.

They are of course within their rights to do this but there will be a great hue and cry when they do.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

The danger lies in the fact that Apple will most likely take legal steps to stop other companies from developing similar software on other platforms.

What do you believe that? Multimedia authoring tools are not new, and Apple certainly isn't the first to offer such tools.

[speakingtohe]

Could be wrong. Time will tell

[kartu]

Apple claims some rights over what you make using their software. I know of no other software that does this, and the very idea strikes me as objectionable and worthy of ridicule, regardless of practical effect.

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Yeah, but this isn't what's happening here. There is no "standard" that they are embracing. These books aren't epubs, don't claim to be epubs, have the extension .ibook, and can only be used on an iPad.

"The iBooks app for iPad (a free download from the App Store) includes a built in iBookstore with access to thousands of books you can download and begin reading immediately. And because the iBooks app uses ePub, the most popular open book format in the world..."

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kartu

"The iBooks app for iPad (a free download from the App Store) includes a built in iBookstore with access to thousands of books you can download and begin reading immediately. And because the iBooks app uses ePub, the most popular open book format in the world..."

I'm honestly not sure what point you're making here, kartu. The iBooks app can indeed read ePub books, but it can read other things too, including the multimedia books that "iBooks Author" produces.

[murraypaul]

Holy misleading truncated quote, Batman!

Originally Posted by kartu

"The iBooks app for iPad (a free download from the App Store) includes a built in iBookstore with access to thousands of books you can download and begin reading immediately. And because the iBooks app uses ePub, the most popular open book format in the world..."

And because the iBooks app uses ePub, the most popular open book format in the world, you can also use it to read ePub books you get from other sources with your computer.

Which is true.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by leebase

Sure, people want their cake and eat it too. If someone wants a "one tool for all platforms"...then the iBooks Author is not for them...
Lee

If you want a tool for, or to run on all platforms, then anything Apple ever does is not for you.

[heySkippy]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

If you want a tool for, or to run on all platforms, then anything Apple ever does is not for you.

Why not? Macs run Windows as well as any other computer these days, if you're so inclined.

[Katsunami]

Because if one does most or all of his work in Windows, then it would not be necessary to buy a Mac, except if you want one for the design or need an osx-only program (which most of then being from Apple themselves, because no other software maker will squander 90% of the desktop/laptop market).

But the real problem here is what Kartu said above: Apple wants to have a say in what you (and they) can do with the product (*your* product) made with their software. And just as Kartu, I never saw that with any other manufacturer previously.

I know the stuff runs on the iPad only, but still I think it's wrong Apple wanting to have a say in what people can or can't do with the stuff they made themselves, just because they used an Apple program to make it. It's just wrong on so many levels. For me, it even feels evil.

[kovidgoyal]

The article got it only slightly wrong. Apple isn't sabotaging epub, they're sabotaging ebooks. Probably the author conflates epub with ebooks, an understandable mistake.

Of course, Apple isn't alone in this behavior, I wouldn't even call them the worst offenders. They, at least, have the virute of being only sporadically effective. Pretty much every corporation with revenue > $1B feels free to try to sabotage some public good for its own short-term benefit, at some point in its history or the other.

Just ignore their efforts, these too will fail eventually.

[leebase]

Destroy the public good? Without Apple, there would be no tablet market. Apple has created a tool to make it easy to create the kind of interactive text books that many companies have tried AND FAILED to make economically viable before.

Standardization comes AFTER innovation. Apple is blazing a trail here. A trail that doesn't exist yet. A trail that STILL might not succeed. Apple has placed a multi million dollar bet.

Even with the iPad and the iBooks Authoring tool and the cooperation of the 3 publishers that control 90% of the high school text book market....Apple still has an upward battle on it's hands. Getting school systems to buy into this plan is going to be the toughest component.

And what are folks whining about? That Apple hasn't given away all that it's investing in to it's competitors so that customers who want the benefit of all of Apple's efforts, can give their money to Apple's competitors instead.

Apple isn't evil for wanting a return on it's investment. Apple isn't evil for not giving away it's intellectual property to it's competition. Let us conveniently ignore that Apple developed the webkit code that ALL mobile web browsers now use...free of charge as open source. Clearly, most of what Apple does Apple does not give away.

But so what? If Apple didn't do what Apple does there'd be no tablet market to begin with and we wouldn't be talking about the advent of low cost yet highly interactive text books.


Lee

[kovidgoyal]

Sigh. Apple did not develop webkit, webkit started as KHTML which was the HTML rendering engine of Konqueror, which is why it is open source (LGPL licensed), not because Apple wanted it to be.

If Apple cared about the public good, they would have implemented their textbook solution as an open, interoperable, standard rather than trying to acheive a monopoly by vendor lock in. They could still have been highly profitable and still have acheived market dominance without the vendor lock in. In fact it would have been a lot easier to convince school systems to adopt their solution if it was open. But, that would have required them to have a little more self confidence than they have displayed in the past.