Will Apple Allow Other eBook Reader Apps on the iPad?
Publishers are all a-buzz about the iPad, because it provides a new possibility for reading e-books. No more will readers have to put up with the poor contrast of the Kindle. No more will readers have to buy a dedicated device that does little more than just display e-books. The iPad, for just a few dollars more than the Kindle DX, offers a host of features, from web browsing and e-mail to gaming and productivity apps.
However, it’s not clear yet whether Apple will allow other e-book apps on the iPad. There are many such apps for the iPhone, but Apple’s conditions for accepting apps in the App Store require that they do not duplicate the functionality of built-in applications. For example, one e-mail program was refused because it “duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail,” another because it “duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.”
Now that there’s an e-book app on the iPad – it’s called iBooks – will Apple allow others to provide or sell similar apps? Will they nix the Kindle app for the iPad? The Kindle app is available for free for the iPhone and iPad mini (or iPod touch), but there is no built-in Apple functionality for those devices. And will Apple eventually make a version of iBooks for the small-screen devices, thereby eliminating existing e-book apps for the iPhone and iPod touch?
This may get more complicated outside the US. For now, Apple is only providing the iBooks app for users of the iPad in the US. They haven’t said when they will be selling e-books in other countries (and that will certainly depend on agreements in each country, so will not happen for all countries at the same time). Will they therefore allow e-book apps outside the US?
My guess is that if Apple were to disallow e-book apps on the iPad, there would be a movement from Amazon and others to attack Apple on anti-trust grounds. I have no idea of what legal footing Apple would be on to prohibit such apps, and therefore the commerce of ancillary products, on their device. But I would be willing to bet that it would be a big fight, because the future of publishing is playing out on these new portable devices.
Posted: 1/29/2010 by kirk | Filed under: Apple & Mac OS X, Books | 14 Comments »
, 
, or 
.
So this is why nobody has built a better music player for the iPod touch? Apple’s built in music player is way limited. It doesn’t even scroll long song names, even when they are playing, so if you have a track with a name that is longer than so many characters, you will never beyond the Xth character, which is annoying if most of your tracks are classical tracks with the movements written out.
That and about a dozen other annoying things (I want to view and maybe even edit all of the metadata in my tracks). This was the thing I was looking forward to the most from the new SDK, and I had assumed up to now that no one had bothered with it. But more likely, there have been good apps but Apple just blocks them.
Also, any word on if the iBooks app, which uses the ePub format (I think that is it), will allow import from other sources?
For music players, yes; you simply can’t
As for the ePub and other books, no word yet. I also don’t know if it can display PDFs, which interests me a lot.
Also, if you look closely at the keynote, it looks like iBooks suffers from the same problem as many of the other eBook readers I have tried (Kindle on the iPhone gets it right). Namely, when you resize the font, the text shoots forward or backwards and you lose your place. On the iPhone Kindle App, the first word of the page remains the first word of the page throughout page turns.
I wasn’t able to see if it has an accelerometer locking feature so you can read on your side, but I am going to assume that Apple was smart enough to at least include that.
I sure hope they allow us to keep using other reading apps like Kindle on the iPad. It would be nice to be able to read the books I already have in Kindle format on there. I am certainly not going to buy the books a second time. There is still so much we don’t know about the iPad. But I definitely plan to get one.
I think Apple will have to open up the iPad to other ereaders.
The app that Apple demonstrated reminded me of the first version of Stanza on the iphone (indeed I wondered if this was where it came from). The new version of Stanza focuses white print on a black background which is much more readable. Why do we need to pretend to be a book?
The Kindle App will surely me here — kind of beats of European competition rules.
BTW, there are other music apps – Spotify, for example. I don’t even have a single MP3 or iTunes track on my iPhone – I just have everything on Spotify.
I suspect if Apple blocks anything, it’ll only block apps that provide an e-book marketplace /and/ reader.. so that would still cover Kindle, but not individual e-book apps.
Yes, there is Spotify (if you’re in certain countries), but I don’t think there are other apps for managing and playing music loaded on the device.
Yeah, that’s why I suspect Apple would only block e-book marketplaces, rather than readers per-se. And not all authors or publishers will want to use ePub – a rather limited format – anyway, but instead release their own richer interfaces as apps. Hopefully they won’t clamp down on that. :-)
They can’t block marketplaces. Look at the Kindle – you buy from Amazon, and the content gets wired to your device. You don’t buy from the device itself. Any other e-book reader could work like that.
I think you are right. There is a Rhapsody app, which is in direct competition with the iTunes store (the only difference being the method of delivery).
I think not knowing this will stop a lot of people who currently own e reader devices from getting an ipad. Most have hundreds of books in their libraries and if the device is meant to replace e readers then it should at the very least allow the books to be imported
According to Daring Fireball, iBooks is a separate app you have to download (for free) — it’s not built-in to the iPad. Thus this article is a moot point since other ebook readers would not be “duplicating existing functionality.”
Yes, I just saw that. That’s interesting. It could be that Apple is worried about anti-trust issues; otherwise they’d just bundle the app with the device. But there’s also the fact that books aren’t going to be available outside the US at launch, so bundling the app would mean they’d have to disable it for users in different countries. They don’t prepare separate installation packages by territory, so that would add a layer of problems to their installers and updaters.
Maybe they want to make it available for the iPod touch/iPhone.