The Worst of Apple

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball had this to say about the restriction of iBooks Author files tot he iBookstore:

This is Apple at its worst. Let’s hope this just the work of an overzealous lawyer, and not their actual intention.

I completely agree. I can only hope that this will be changed very soon. If not, it really kills a lot of the good will that Apple could otherwise have fostered at this event. There is a lot of good stuff they announced, but this needs to change.

2 replies on “The Worst of Apple”

Sadly, as was pointed out to me, this isn’t unusual. Microsoft does similar things with what you can use their Home & Student editions of Office for and Adobe does with what you can use the Education editions of their products. Is this wording going to stick around? Probably not.

The better question is this: how can Apple police this? They can’t. It’s there to give them a tool to stop people from abusing things (and by abusing, I mean using iBooks Author to create massively popular works for others) and not to stop small-time stuff … like usual.

As an aside, it is called iBooks Author and not eBooks Author or anything else more generic. It is specifically for creating iBooks. A sad precedent, but not as egregious, to me, as others seem to think.

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