How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books:
So Apple, which claims to use the EPUB format exclusively, has now created an incompatible, proprietary version of that format. And with iBooks Author they’ve added licensing terms that restrict what an author can do with the generated content.
The designers of iBooks Author went to great lengths to make sure that the program will not work with “the industry-leading ePub digital book file type.”
[Nobody says you have to use Apple’s tools. Nobody says you have to publish an iBook. No one says that iBook == ePub. What’s the problem here? If you don’t like the format, if you have a vested interest in seeing ePub be the one and only true format then by all means don’t publish your stuff via Author and its currently greedy EULA. Don’t whine that you’ll be missing out on sales, if all this other stuff is important to you that’s a choice you get to make. Everyone runs into this situation growing up. One kid owns a ball. We gather to play a game. Kid is unhappy with the way the game is going (for them) and take their ball and go home. If you want to play in APple’s sandbox, it’s by their rules. If that doesn’t make you happy, don’t play. Feel feel to discourage others not to play.]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 