Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a misreading. My read is "If you sell the output of this, you grant us exclusivity. If you breach exclusivity, we have a variety of options in dealing with you, including refusing to carry your work on our platform. In the event we do this we don't owe you anything even if you think it sure would have been a swell thing if we had distributed through our platform and are inclined to sue us over the imputed lost revenue."

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."

In the publishing world an author provides exclusivity in exchange to something. Usually the author gets some type of advance and the commitment from the publisher to publish and market the book.

Here you are supposed to give up commercial exclusivity merely for the ability to use a piece of software. And there really isn't anything special or expensive about that software either, there are plenty of free ebook creation software options.

Furthermore, in the usual publishing contract if the publisher that has exclusivity declines to publish something, the author can usually shop the work to other publishers. Not here. Here apparently if Apple says no, you are pretty much screwed, you cannot sell your work anywhere.

And by the way, I do not think that the original article authors are misreading anything. The agreement says:

"Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution"

This means they can refuse distribution for any reason, and you do not need to do anything wrong to be refused. And of course if they refuse you do not have the right to sell your work anywhere else.

Exactly. It's the inclusion of an exclusivity clause inside a "click-through" EULA that's the, er, "innovative" aspect here. And like others I find this pretty borderline immoral. Contract law is about two parties on equal standing coming to a negotiated agreement, it's not well suited to the "take it or leave it" metaphor of software use.

Here you are supposed to give up commercial exclusivity merely for the ability to use a piece of software. And there really isn't anything special or expensive about that software either, there are plenty of free ebook creation software options.

Then USE THOSE. The only exclusivity you give is of the file output you made with that software.

Not of your literary work itself.

Unfortunately, that depends on the definition of 'Work' in this context which is far from clear.

"Here you are supposed to give up commercial exclusivity merely for the ability to use a piece of software. And there really isn't anything special or expensive about that software either"

If that is true, what is the fuzz about?

"Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution"

You wouldn't find this in Amazon's EULA? They would publish anything? There's no way Apple would leave that door open.

"And there really isn't anything special or expensive about that software either, there are plenty of free ebook creation software options."

You're selling a different experience here. If you're writing a static book then there is no reason to go this route right now. If you're creating something interactive then this might be something to look into.

The exclusivity clause is being misinterpreted. They aren't demanding exclusivity for the content of the book, only for the Author-provided layout.

With my reading of this, you are free to sell your book in as many places as you like, as long as you don't use Author to publish for those other platforms. Since Author is being distributed for the express purpose of publishing to iBooks, I can't see why this would be a problem.

I agree. The demos all show text being imported from some other text file (likely whatever the writer has already written to distribute elsewhere). Then Author is just used to add an additional level of interactivity for iBook distribution.

A writer could write their whole book in Author, but that's misusing the tool. Author is a great tool for adding additional interactive content to an already written book. It's a lousy tool for writing content you want to also put elsewhere. It seems like most complaints come from the assumption that the writer will be using Author as their primary writing tool. That's not how to get the most out of Author.

People who misuse Author still deserve fair treatment.

Yeah, and they still can get their text out of the program, and format it again in some other program.

Nobody demands or will demand the literary rights of the content of people writing primarily in iBooks Author.

Just that they don't use the output file of that program for selling it elsewhere.

The license terms are not clear as to whether they lay claim to the output or to anything you create with the app, which would include the content if you use it as your word processor. Certainly a lot of people are giving them a charitable interpretation of it, but if that was their intent, I don't see why they didn't state it explicitly.

I don't know, this sounds very clear-cut to me:

> if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple

What do you base your interpretation on?

Remember, it is a contract. It only looks like English language.

I don't have a full copy of the EULA, but in another article they state that "Work" is "any book or other work you generate using this software". They are talking about the output of the program, they are not restricting your original content.

So, if you want to sell a PDF of your book through other channels, you better not make the PDF with this software. Use the "Print to PDF" popup in your regular software or something.

Oh, of course. The discussion is about the output of this program, though. If you format your book with it, you lose all the formatting if you want to publish on other channels, as the article said.

> 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.

It is common in the publishing world to only tell the author about the exclusivity after they've completed their book?

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