David Smith:
All Apple is doing with this restriction is saying that if you directly profit from this free tool and platform that we have created, then we deserve our cut. Which seems entirely fair to me.
The range of opinion on Apple’s policies regarding distribution of iBooks Author-created content is fascinating and runs the gamut from fair to “APPLE IS EVIL!!!!”.
it’s really simple. You don’t like the rules. Don’t play the game. Go use something else to make your ebook and do with it what you wish.
But Apple gave me this FREE tool to write books so I should be allowed to sell my prose on ANY site, by ANY means I choose; using my graphic/writing talents. I believe I earned it. I’m not doing this for FREE! I bought MS Word and MS don’t stick me. Even when I publish my licensed Adobe illustrations and Getty images, I’m not being asked to front up. I mean come on Apple, you’re just gouging us… like Ed Bott (ZDNet) says Apple is being ‘mindbogglingly greedy’!
/sarcasm
You perfectly articulated the “I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about” position in this argument.
How is iBooks gouging you? By offering to sell your work to iPad users while sending you 70% of the retail price that you yourself set? By providing you with a truly WYSIWYG digital book platform that cuts authoring time down to 10% of all other digital book platforms? MS Word did not come with a Publish button that puts money into your bank account. You paid Microsoft for Word and they didn’t pay you a single penny. You didn’t pay Apple for iBooks Author and Apple has offered to send you money. Where is the gouging?
Further, there is no other reader that can run these books. If you want to sell on Amazon, you have to make a proprietary Amazon book, no matter what iBooks Author’s license agreement is. The file that iBooks makes runs as a sellable book in iBookstore, but for any other book platform, it is going to need to be converted at the very least.
And, the main point of the iBooks platform is that there is a single authoring tool on Mac and single reader on iPad, so you can author a book on a Mac, then view it on iPad and get the exact same result as what you built on the Mac. This is what it takes to get WYSIWYG these days. It takes a tiny fraction of the time to make an iBook than any other eBook not just because the authoring tool is easy to use or powerful, but because the same renderer is being used on both Mac and iPad. There are very few of the surprises or gotchas that Web and print publishing is famous for, because in Web and print, you are authoring on a device that is fundamentally different from the viewing device the reader is using. In print, there is a whole different color system and light turns into ink. On the Web, you author on a late-model MacBook with Safari, and your reader has an old IE on Windows XP with a dim, blurry screen. That is a huge technical overhead to put onto a book publisher or writer. It costs so much that it kills thousands or even millions of book projects.
What Apple has done is prioritized writers, editors, producers, creative people, content, readers, and the “liberal arts” side of publishing over the technical side. This is a huge gift to book publishers. This is the first digital book platform that book publishers will be able to successfully use. The part of the demo where the guy from Apple dropped a Word document into iBooks Author and it all the styles and sections where properly converted into a book chapter is a kind of holy grail for book publishers. You could hear a gasp in the room. They all inherited millions of crappy Word documents from all different versions of Word, from various decades, and it is a giant mess to reuse that content. Print publishers did not expect to have to redo every book again over in digital. They looked at a print copy as the master copy. Their digital stuff is a disaster. iBooks Author is like a light at the end of the tunnel: go here, drag in your content. publish a book, get 70% of your retail price, or publish for $0 with no server costs, no store costs, no distribution costs at all.
So if you don’t see any value in what Apple just did, then iBooks Author is not for you. Move on to something that was made for you, something that you can understand.
My, oh My. I knew I should have put the word
/sarcasm
below my text. But I figure Ed Bott from ZDNet would be the BIG indicator. Check him out.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360?tag=content;siu-container
I believe Player_16 was being sarcastic.
Sorry to bait you but this is a modified common statement that’s going all over the bloggosphere now. Pretty lame huh?
Thank ZDNet’s Ed Bott.