Comments on: Will Apple Allow Other eBook Reader Apps on the iPad?

By: Aaron Meurer

Aaron Meurer — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:16:35 +0000

Maybe they want to make it available for the iPod touch/iPhone.

By: kirk

kirk — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:05:00 +0000

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.

By: Marc

Marc — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:54:40 +0000

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.”

By: Bill H

Bill H — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:18:42 +0000

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

By: Aaron Meurer

Aaron Meurer — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:55:58 +0000

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).

By: kirk

kirk — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:56:51 +0000

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.

By: Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:18:11 +0000

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. :-)

By: kirk

kirk — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:17:44 +0000

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.

By: Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:12:45 +0000

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.

By: Andy Howell

Andy Howell — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:56:36 +0000

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.

By: Kara Sjoblom-Bay

Kara Sjoblom-Bay — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:59:37 +0000

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.

By: Aaron Meurer

Aaron Meurer — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:35:13 +0000

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.

By: kirk

kirk — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:21:20 +0000

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.

By: Aaron Meurer

Aaron Meurer — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:19:56 +0000

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?