The Answer Is in the Name

Today Apple held their much-anticipated edu­ca­tion announce­ment at the Guggenheim museum in New York. As you are prob­a­bly aware, Apple announced three new prod­ucts dur­ing the event: iBooks 2, iTunesU.app and iBooks Author. I’m not going to go into any deep analy­sis of the event. It’s been so long since I was even vaguely involved with the edu­ca­tion mar­ket that I really can’t muster up any deep insight into Apple’s ini­tia­tives. As usual, though, the reac­tion to Apple’s announce­ments by the blo­go­ratti does pro­vide a rich and fer­tile ground of annoy­ing stu­pid­ity which we can harvest.

One emerg­ing theme annoys me in par­tic­u­lar: the idea that Apple is exert­ing Draconian con­trol over how you can sell con­tent pro­duced with iBooks Author.

The story goes like this. When you attempt to export your work from iBooks Author a dia­log appears stating:

Note: Books can only be sold through the iBook­store. To pub­lish your book on the iBook­store, choose File > Publish.

This is rein­forced by lan­guage within the end-user license agree­ment (EULA) that reads:

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you charge a fee for any book or other work you gen­er­ate using this soft­ware (a “Work”), you may only sell or dis­trib­ute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBook­store) and such dis­tri­b­u­tion will be sub­ject to a sep­a­rate agree­ment with Apple.

This, of course has raised the hack­les of the pun­di­toc­racy. The restric­tion is being called “unprece­dented”, “auda­cious” and DRACONIAN. John Gruber even goes so far as to call it “…Apple at it’s worst.” People are shout­ing, “How dare Apple tell me what I can and can’t do with soft­ware I bought¹? No one else does this.”

The thing is, I’m fairly cer­tain that those peo­ple didn’t see the same announce­ment that I did.

I’m going back over the live-blogs of the event, and look­ing on Apple’s iBooks Author prod­uct page and for the life of me I can’t find where Apple is posi­tion­ing this prod­uct as a generic ePub edi­tor. In fact, from what I gather from peo­ple who have done the research, the iBook­store for­mat, while based on ePub, diverges pretty strongly from the standard.

The bot­tom line is, the answer is in the name — iBooks Author, not ePub Author, or Pages 2012. As much as peo­ple would like to think that iBooks Author is a gen­eral pur­pose book pub­lish­ing tool, Apple clearly thinks otherwise.

I can sym­pa­thise with the frus­tra­tion. I’ve been noodling on an arti­cle with the the­sis that Apple needs to step up and pro­vide both a pro­fes­sional level ePub author­ing tool as well as a pro­fes­sional grade appli­ca­tion for pro­duc­ing bet­ter Newsstand apps. But iBooks Author is obvi­ously not that par­tic­u­lar hip­pogriff. I hon­estly don’t find it unrea­son­able for Apple to expect that paid con­tent pro­duced within it’s free tool (designed and mar­keted as a tool to work with one spe­cific store­front) should be sold via offi­cial chan­nels. Hell, I’m actu­ally amazed that Apple is putting no restric­tions on unpaid con­tent. You can export ibooks for­mat files and scat­ter them to the four winds for all they care. Just as long as you don’t get any dosh for them.

Once again, the tech press and pun­dits would do much bet­ter if they would actu­ally pay atten­tion to what Apple announces instead of the announce­ment that they make up in their heads.