Apple Doesn’t Play Well With Others (eBook Edition)

Apple has been playing footsie with Exonn Mobile for the title of the biggest company in the world for a while now, and their most recent financials go to show the even after the death of founder and visionary Steve Jobs – the truck keeps on rollin’. They produce the most popular smartphone, they dominate the tablet market, they are increasingly dominating the PC market, and they are one of the strongest voices in online content from music to movies – not a small “indie” operation then. Why do I ring all this up? Because Apple is using that considerable wealth and influence to destroy open competitors.

Apple has a history of trying to lock out competitors from their devices. First there was the Apple “FairPlay” DRM that was wrapped around music bought from iTunes that no competitor could offer – eventually making all other DRM on music files obsolete. It was only when the labels finally acquiesced on the topic of DRM-free MP3s could other digital music stores start to compete with Apple to sell music for iPods. Now there is Apple using the old “embrace, extend, and extinguish” method to squeeze out competitors in the eBook market.

For the last two years Apple has embraced the open ePub format for books – it was the only format they supported at the launch of iBooks 1.0. But now they have extended that open standard with unsupported CSS extensions and a closed proprietary Apple XML namespace – preventing others from supporting the format. iBooks author may now make something that looks an awful lot like EPUB3, but it most certainly isn’t because Apple doesn’t to compete in a marketplace.

Now you could be thinking – what’s the harm? The harm is that Apple has been promoting the use of iBooks Author and iPads to schools to “improve” education with digital textbooks. They are trying to woo schools and education establishments into locked in devices and services where they can only use Apple products in the future or risk losing their digital library – because no other e-reader or tablet can open the books. Apple won’t even let authors import ePub works in iBooks Author to convert them into Apple’s new proprietary filetype – they are trying to get authors and therefore users locked into the Apple monopoly where Apple can pick the price, pick what is censored, and pick how people read.

If you’re an author it would be a mistake to ignore Apple’s format as they have a huge marketshare, but why not let authors convert between the formats? Why force an author into a situation where they are beholden to Apple for selling all copies of their book?

Real, dead-wood books can be read by anyone, but Apple wants e-reading to be limited to those who bought their products. It’s about time the anti-trust and competition investigators looked into this.