This was already addressed in the article. iBooks has a significantly smaller variety of books than Amazon. By becoming the sole gatekeeper for content, Apple is ruling out larger distributers. Users don't gain from this. Only Apple.
But will this be true for long, now that this particular shoe has dropped?
Apple's primary target here is probably Amazon. A company which, incidentally, is no stranger to the art of using a powerful distribution network, an existing customer base, and a DRM-locked e-reader platform as a lever to demand big shares of revenue:
http://www.jeremyrossmedia.com/2010/02/21/word-kindle-70-30-...
According to this article, and the Stross piece linked therein, Amazon's standard deal is that they take seventy percent. Their "generous" deal for self-publishers is that they take a mere 30%... but the publisher must give Amazon the right to set the price as Amazon sees fit.
Makes Apple's 30% cut look pretty good, actually. But, of course, if you're a print publisher you pretty much have to have a deal with Amazon, so I expect there are a lot of negotiations going on right now.
True, some users might have some switching pain, but that's true for most things. Windows to Mac, Xbox to PS3, Kindle to Nook. Lock in is real, but rarely determinative.
Consumers vote with their wallets. The free market is a powerful thing.
It strikes me that this is a pretty unreasonable complaint. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I don't think it's fair to moan when it turns out it's a duck.
I'm not knocking Apple, I like Apple but we as consumers need to be aware of what we're buying into and I don't think we can moan that it was in anyway unclear the way they behave, particularly to the sort of person who frequents Hacker News and really can't feign ignorance.
I'm saying that shutting out apps because they don't cough up Apple's ransom only hurts the customer and that customers won't necessarily vote with their wallet and move somewhere else because they have already invested in their current platform/device.
Still, in this case, I think Apple is engaging in a weird sort of brinkmanship with distributors, and I'm not sure they're in a position to dictate such terms.
iBooks is still an also-ran. Publishers pretty much have to work with Amazon. iBooks is easier to ignore, I should think.
But ignoring the iOS market gets harder by the day. There's a lot of tasty, tasty customers out there.
We'll see what happens. Note that Apple's new, um, clarification of its policy doesn't take effect for several months. I expect there will be weeks of furious behind-the-scenes jockeying for position among Apple, Amazon, and various publishers, after which there might be more announcements.
You mean users lose out on the larger distributers. I know I'm going to get voted down for this, but I think an ecosystem of small and independent players producing content might actually be beneficial to users in the long run.
Apple is doing the distribution, so what purpose do the large distributors have? The only things that the customer needs are discovery and tastemakers. Distribution isn't so much a problem in the age of the internet.
We'll see how it shakes out. Maybe it'll be like the "nothing but objective-c" thing. People freak out too much about this kind of stuff.
I think part of the reason they rescinded on that is because people freaked out about it :)
Mostly, it was about keeping crappy flash apps of iOS. And from a platform perspective, that did actually make a lot of sense.