How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books

How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books(zdnet.com)

11 points by brok3nmachine 14 years ago | 6 comments

freshhawk 14 years ago |

We have one so far.

Let's see how many comments we can get explaining why this was bad when Microsoft did it with IE but just fine when Apple does it with iBooks.

Bonus points if you somehow spin embrace-extend-destroy as a good thing by conflating what's good for the users with what's good for Apple and its shareholders.

salem 14 years ago | |

I still don't understand how they are getting away with the 'agency model' for ebooks. With those deals, no one but apple can make money selling ebooks in a native app on an iphone/ipad.

Turing_Machine 14 years ago | |

Apple has nothing like the monopoly position Microsoft had, certainly not in ebooks.

The closest to that would be Amazon, whose reader doesn't support epub at all.

dpitkin 14 years ago | |

freshhawk "you get used to it" is what a good friend told me about the troubles with using only apple products, did you see how much money they made

denzil_correa 14 years ago |

Most companies are using the open standards of the web and using them to build their own closed standards. Apple isn't the only one, Amazon et al are as guilty as everyone around. Hardware lock-in from the previous decade has now moved to content lock-in on the Internet.

breathesalt 14 years ago |

This is a false dilemma. Authors don't have to use iBooks software to author ebooks and users don't have to use iBooks to read ebooks on the iPad (and they probably don't because it's really buggy). Problem solved.