Apple can, and will, decide what expression will be published. It's not a platform, it's more like a newspaper classified section, with bias.
That's what I used to believe their business was.
Now, it's clear that an iBook is not a book. It is a digital material sold to people who like to consume content via their pretty and pricy devices. I agree that Apple makes it fun to consume content their way. And I'm sure that for the most part, people can still mostly absorb all the same knowledge that they would from a traditional paper book. But, this content has to be approved and modified to be consumed and therefor, it is not a book.
So the reason I am not comfortable with all this is for the reason I stated above. I was essentially tricked into believing they were selling books. Now that probably sounds extreme. But, the truth is that I am an educated "tech person" who looks at this stuff every day, and I did not think about this problem until now. The people they are trying to sell to are those in education, who are going to be raising and educating young people by reading these iBooks. When I was a kid, we were taught that books were magical and that the more we read, the more open our minds would become. In elementary school, we made us sing songs about books to make reading seem more fun and appealing.
If schools are adopting this form of content, then they are telling young people that the best way to learn things is via a model that is filtered (simply to increase Apple's profits).
Major distribution has always meant going through filters. The publishing houses reject most of the stuff that comes through their doors, and bookstores only buy a fraction of the stuff that the publishing houses put out. If you are scandalized that Apple rejects one book out of millions, I can only suppose it's because you aren't familiar with legacy publishing. Traditionally, only a tiny fraction of books ever had a chance to be seen by readers.
(I say this not to defend Apple, per se, but to illustrate how good writers have really got it now if this is considered a subject of outrage. Just ten years ago, getting rejected was the expected outcome of trying to get a book published!)
And yes, you are right. I am admittedly ignorant to the nuances and history of publishing, and am thus probably neglecting to look at this from different angles.
They have actively worked to disable any other store - for example, the kindle app cannot allow purchases or even link to the kindle store online, you have to manually search out links online instead, then download. It's absurd, not in the users' interests, and an abuse of Apple's power over the platform, but that's what Apple require.
There are plenty of alternate options to iBookStore. Nobody is forcing you to use it.
If book stores are curating simply based on physical space then all of them would pick the top 1000 books in order to maximise profits. But they don't. They curate based on the type of books THEY want to sell and that represents them.
Thats not creepy at all.
And this one message travels the world. For our standards, here in Holland, the app store policy representa fundamentalistic christian values. If they keep this up,we might actually see legislation concerning allowing side-loading.