Apple, please stop being a crapweasle….
Apple,
Today you announced your push into textbooks. I think this is great, it is wonderful. Even greater, even more wonderful, is the fact that you have released a authoring tool for ebooks that is perhaps the best ever made.
iBook Author is an amazing piece of work. It really is, I am deeply impressed. I really, really, want to use it; unfortunately I can’t, because you are being a crapweasle —
And people who know me know I avoid language like that, at least in public. When I recently wrote about the worst customer experience I ever had, I could have used any number of choice terms or salacious language, but I didn’t. So when I call Apple a crapweasle, please know I am feeling extra perturbed about it.
— You see, Apple has placed an interesting restriction on books produced with iBook Author: if I charge for them, I cannot publish anywhere but iBooks. This is unacceptable. As a author and a publisher (let us be very clear, Apple is not the publisher, they are the store) I get to decide where I sell my works. Apple is attempting to do the same kind of vendor lockin that they do with apps for the iPad and iPhone, but they are doing it for a format that is open and can work on almost anything.
So I can either use Apple’s tool, and then re-author for other stores, or I can just make a single version that will work everywhere. So then what is my incentive to use iBooks Author?
But, I hear the straw man in my head saying, they don’t care if you publish the book for free. That is something good right? Kinda, sorta, maybe, but I see some big problems.
Apple doesn’t define what they mean by non-commercial. Can I put ads in my book? Can I put ads on the page with my book? Can I charge for something else and then bundle my book with it? There are a lot of unknowns, too many unknowns for me to want to risk using iBook Author even for free works.
So please Apple, I want to use iBook Author, I really do. So change the license, or charge for a version that can be used on other platforms.
But no matter what you do: stop being a crapweasle…
