[I]f Amazon was a “threat” that needed to be squelched by means of an illegal conspiracy, why would Apple offer
Amazon’s Kindle app on the iPad? Why would Apple conclude that conspiring to force Amazon to no longer lose
money on eBooks would cripple Amazon’s competitive fortunes? And why would Apple perceive the need for an
illegal solution to the “Kindle threat” when it had an obvious and lawful one which it implemented – namely,
introducing a multipurpose device (the iPad) whose marketing and sales success was not centered on eBook sales?
The IDPF has got together a who’s-who of people and companies in the eBook world to work on an open-source implementation of a reference ePub3 reading system and container library. And of course Kobo is putting a ton of weight behind it. Also, me: I’m going to be working on this project full-time here very shortly.
The astute Mr. Gemmell earlier today made note
of a rather elitist-sounding article
over at paidContent:UK. The author of that piece rather laments the fact that
eBook consumption is led by ‘genre fiction’. You know– everything that most people
read; something — shudder — classifiable. Science fiction. Romance. Crime.
Horror. Fantasy. Historical.
It’s been fascinating to read all the remembrances of Steve Jobs over the past couple of days, and all the inspiring eulogies written by those whose lives he had profoundly affected in some way.
I got into computers at an early age. I suppose it was only natural— my father had been involved with computers and programming since university in the mid 60’s, and by the time I was about 6 or 7 he was working with programming enough that he had a computer at home, on which I wrote my first BASIC program at the age of 8 or 9. My first real exposure to the whole world of computers, however, came through a BBC series called The Dream Machine.
Apple’s Installer doesn’t do uninstallation. It could, since a certain amount of metadata is left around, but that could be extended to something truly useful and Apple-like in its simplicity.
The root cause for so much of the subscription ruckus, I think, isn’t that 30% number — it’s that Apple pulled the rug out from under some major apps after the fact. … [T]heir months or years of hard work, and in many cases, their entire businesses — can be yanked by Apple’s whim at any time for reasons that they couldn’t have anticipated or avoided. … [I]f Apple breaks that expectation by changing an important rule in a way that we think isn’t justifiable, it’s perfectly reasonable for us to complain about it as loudly as possible in order to effect change.
