Boydo's Tech Talk

Just a heads up for those of you using iPads and iPhones for eBook reading through apps such as the Kindle, Kobo and Nook apps.

If you remember, Apple drew the ire from the user community for wanting to claim 30% of the revenue for in app purchases for media publications including newspaper subscriptions and magazine subscriptions. However, the eBook apps had worked around this by sending customers to their own websites to conduct the purchase with zero revenue going to Apple in this situation.

Well, Apple has made a “compromise” for these apps, specifically:

• eBook reader apps can no longer allow direct purchasing from within the app,
• purchases must be made from the corresponding website outside the app,
• the app must not offer any links to their own website or external eBook stores.

I could only guess that Apple has done this to make competing eBook reader apps less convenient compared to its own iBooks app which allows in app purchases. If this line of argument holds water, I sure hope that we see an anti-competitive suit very soon as this is really quite an abuse of Apple’s position of platform owner and publisher of sorts. For me, this is incentive to fragment my media consumption across other devices, including:

• converged devices like Android and Windows Phone devices,
• dedicated devices like the Amazon Kindle.

As with many things, we’ll see how this pans out but its not the first time that Apple has attempted to wield its control over the platform for questionable reasons.

Way back at the start of the year, I wrote an article about Apple’s iPad being a market disrupter or DOA and mentioned that I had made a prediction with the wife that 2010 was going to be the year of the eBook. I still stand by that prediction and I think we have seen significant development in the market including:

• the introduction of Border’s Kobo and the Barnes and Noble Nook,
• significant price drops by Amazon and the release of the Kindle 3,
• changes to the way Amazon splits profits with content creators to match Apple’s 30/70 split.

Of course, Apple made its entrance into the market this year and many believed that this was going to be a turning point in the history of eBooks. Perhaps that might still be true but at least within Australia the iBookStore is filled with old relics of literature (which isn’t such a bad thing if you like that sort of stuff but for others it might resemble an desert with a few tumbleweeds).

Where are the publishers and where are the eBooks?

Not being an incredible bookworm I can hardly talk but I reckon that it is important for any bookstore (online or physical) to have a wide selection of titles. Apple’s competition are streets ahead in this regard and unless Apple gets their act together in the next couple of months I can see them missing out.

What I do find irritating is that Apple (and other companies including Microsoft and Amazon) focus only on the USA for an extended period of time and go to extreme lengths to shut out the rest of the world when clearly there is a demand for a product. By the same token, releasing a stillborn product or service like the iBookStore is a slap in the face for consumers.

Anyway, my wife has happily bought a stack of eBooks from Amazon and Borders and using the respective applications on her iPad for her reading. I don’t think that Apple is going to make the market impact that everybody was expecting and when it does eventually come to the party I don’t believe we’ll see much loyalty.

eBooks are all about getting the content you want for the best price when and where you want it. Apple just isn’t in the game at the moment and as far as I am concerned they may as well have been a late scratching.