Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement

"iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad."

That's why every comparison between iBooks Author and Office or Photoshop or 3DS Max or any other creative application rings so disingenuous in my mind. They're not even restricting distribution outside of their platform, they just don't want you making money from it. What evilness am I missing?

Exclusivity is still a very cruddy contractual term for authors, if viewed against the universe of "all possible contractual arrangements", but it is far from uncommon in the publishing world. I mean, everyone is pretty much in the business of exclusive distribution towards channels they control. If you sign with a dead-tree publisher, they're going to want exclusive rights to be your only dead-tree publisher in a geographic, cultural, or linguistic territory, even if you could get someone else to kill trees on your behalf and double your sales that way.

You'd have to weigh access to the Apple megaphone versus the sales you could be making through other platforms/channels. If I were (hypothetically) going to get into ebook publishing, I'd take note that Amazon is much more generous (off the top of my head standard Kindle publishing requires no exclusivity and one of their programs wants just a 90 day exclusivity window for e-publishing). This would allow you to simultaneously sell through e.g. your own site to a pre-existing fanbase and avoid the 30% (or whatever) rake, or do things like "Hiya I'm the author of five novels and counting in this sci-fi universe I created. The first one is $0.99 on Amazon or totally free if you sign up for my email list."

I can't think of any sensible way to decide whether or not data was "generated by" a piece of software. If you export your book to plain text, is that not "generated by" the app? Why not? It's the app's output. But it's also your own copyrighted work in a more or less rudimentary form.

Imagine you first write your book in Apple's app and save it to an iBook file that falls under Apple's restrictions. Then you retype your entire book in a 3rd party app that can export iBooks perfectly. The 3rd party generated iBook is bit-for-bit identical to Apple's. Now you have "two" files that are subject to different licenses, except of course they are the same file.

That's already absurd. But what if instead of retyping your book, you just import it into the 3rd party app from the Apple generated iBook file. You should be able to do that, right? Surely the legal status of the data can't depend on whether or not you typed it by hand. But again, this is absurd because you are importing and exporting to the same format. It optimizes to a file copy.

And this isn't a reductionist argument. The above is an entirely realistic scenario that will inevitably come up whenever an iBook author wants to sell their book outside of Apple's store.

The author missed the definition of "Work" until after they published the article. "Work" is clearly defined in the EULA as the output of the Apple software.

The Apple software in question is the last encoding step in a workflow to publish iBooks. If you aren't publishing an iBook, use a different tool for that last step.

It is its sole purpose.

Apple as a publisher provides you this software for free specifically to help you publish on their own store. And they restrict you to use it only for that. They don't own your content.

You can create ePub documents with Pages (for example), which are readable with any ebook reader, and you are not limited in any way in how you choose to distribute them.

I don't think this is comparable to restricting the use of a Word or PDF document.

"Updated to add: By “it,” I am referring to the book, not the content. The program allows you to export your work as plain text, with all formatting stripped. So you do have the option to take the formatting work you did in iBooks Author, throw it away, and start over."

This is about format, not content. Nothing to see here.

First on the EULA: even if you used a program to do a formatting, said formatting is still your work, and the EULA recognize that by using the term work, so Apple is basically saying: if you use our "free" tool you have to give us a part of your work. So how exactly is that free? i don't know.

Then what happens if you use something else to do the formatting then just convert using Apple program (if that is possible)? Or if you can't convert redo exactly the same formatting, or something really near. Apple risk to argue that you breached the agreement even if you technically might not have.

And then what happens if they recognize that you used another tool to publish on other platform, but the too version are still too close to their taste? That's when Apple's general attitude and evilness will enter the game. They will say: I don't publish you, and I don't have to give any reason for that. You might say, yeah it is the game, it is their right. Except two things: the kind of people who object that typically also fake a taste for liberalism and free markets and so on (they are more probably thinking about something anarcho-capitalism style and how it could be great to make a lot of money fucking people all around you just because you can). I recognize that given the current laws, it is not obvious that Apple's don't have the right to do that, they even might have. But I found this way of doing business highly disgusting. The second thing is that a numerical publisher in Apple style has nothing in common with a real publisher. Their marginal cost for publishing you is absurdly low, their margins guaranteed, and they don't help you with you work (well yeah they kind of help you by "giving" you a program, ok in that case i suppose buying a fancy pen gives the builder some right on the story you wrote with? -- in any case this "help" as nothing in common with the help of a real publisher).

It all can be summarized with: Apple is constructing a giant monopolistic market, because well it is obvious that monopolies works and brings an absurd amount of money. And now every other giant multinationals find how brilliant this is and are trying to do the same, even for PC. They might even say it is not monopolies because they are multiple of those, and if they turn their sentence to say that "well" people might even believe them.

If this is the kind of world you want and like to live in, good for you. On my side, it makes me vomit.

Suppose there is an annual fee to join the iBookstore. Would there be a different reaction to this EULA if Author was hidden behind that "paywall"? Or what if Apple just charged $99 for this app instead of making it free?

The reason everyone is so upset about the EULA is that Apple filled a huge void in the eBook creation software market and Apple filled that void but is rightfully limiting the tool for their own benefit. Everyone was hoping Apple would swoop in an create an awesome tool for making eBooks, but instead they made an awesome tool for making iBooks. Are non-iBook creators worse off today than they were a week ago? Nope.

A better solution (from a PR standpoint, not from a technical standpoint) would have been for Apple to make Author output a proprietary format. After all, no one is crying out because Xcode can't produce Android binaries or standards-compliant webpages. Still, an open format is the best solution for this type of product. You don't want authors having to learn how to cryptographically sign their books or be able to generate ad hoc builds just to get a book to a student. Apple is enforcing DRM at the EULA level rather than at the technical level.

The real disturbing part is this: Apple censors worse than China, and books tend to be provocative, a lot more than music or apps. They essentially want to act as a publisher too, but without taking any risks on the part of authors. I sincerely hope for good literature that ibooks ends to be a flop.

In any case the problem will be solved with 3rd party tools that take an iBook and convert it to (swf|html|exe) that people can sell anywhere they want. Surely apple cannot claim that the output of a conversion program belongs to them as well. Although it would be interesting to see how they react when the first ibook-to-iOS App converter appears.

My guess:

Apple is betting that the tablet is the future of the PC. Apple is also betting that hardware prices will crater like the PC did. The future is about services and less about hardware and the iPad will get cheaper over time. Apple wants to guarantee their 30% cut on publishers, devs, etc. while making it difficult to port it over to other platforms.

I think it's wrong in believing this may have to do with lawyers. I think this is Apple's intent so they can close up any potential loopholes that would give a competitor an equal ground. Apple may not have to do this anyway since Android will probably not be the favored OS to use in education but Apple wants the guarantee.

It is easy to export as PDF. You lose some of the pretty stuff but it does work. http://i.imgur.com/cy8g2.jpg

Based on the past and recent history [think of all the products that Google shutdown recently], it sounds to me that it is much reliable for users, especially if you are going to put your career into it, that the company developing the software is making money from it.

The rest just sounds like Apple might mean the actual compiled digital book is their property. Not the actual internal content, but the functional storage and execution of it. They're trying to keep people from cloning a iBook reader, not trying to lock down the author's work. Indeed not clear and not easy to make clear.

The whole tone of HN floundering.

If your hoping for Apple to fail you have my sympathies. It is only going to get much, much worse.

The only end to this noise that I can see is that Apple will supply an update that removes the .epub capability, making the tool specific to iBooks.

Will we be any poorer for that? It's like having a machine that prints money - you could use it...but you're likely to get into trouble if you do.