Apple is your co-author

"The end-user license agreement for iBooks Author, Apple's new tool for creating electronic textbooks, stipulates that works created with the software can be sold only through Apple--free titles are exempted--unless Apple provides written consent. It also states that Apple may refuse to sell electronic textbooks created with its software and that content creators cannot claim lost profits for rejected works."

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/productivity_apps/232500227

ETA: These are the kinds of things they need to be passing laws to address instead of garbage like SOPA/PIPA.

They shouldn't need to pass laws to address this. People should just refuse to create content under such ridiculous terms.

But if people are so enamoured of Apple that they're willing to throw away their rights in exchange for a shiny new toy, it's their loss.

#2 by _Zoe_> That plan always works great in theory. In theory, practice is the same as theory but in practice, it differs.

I don't want it being legal to say that the product of a tool is in any way controlled by the tool maker. I want that to be a bedrock principle. The fact that all the mobile phone companies have basically the same contracts, all the cable and satellite companies have basically the same contracts, etc. etc. shows about how well the "well, then I'll just take my business elsewhere!" works in practice.

It's not that they "throw away their rights in exchange for a shiny new toy". It's that they know that their only chance of success to break into a market is to agree to draconian terms and so they just bend over and take it in the hopes that they'll actually be able to make a living and put food on their table.

On the other hand, the downside for Apple in such a term is that some tiny percent of income won't be contributed to their juggernaut. And even that's debatable. Right now, their app store is more limited by how much money people have to spend on apps, not how many developers they have trying to break into the market by producing apps for it.

Quite the little empire Apple's built out of having the first GUI back in the dark ages. And, of course, the image of being a "free spirit" rather than a
"geek" or a "good business person". I'm on a permanent anti-Apple rant, lately. I have an elderly aunt who's one of their flunkies, and I recently had to explain that yes, there's an MP3 player on her i-phone. (Despite the fact that there's a perfectly good genius bar near her. Why won't these people help her??? And do you know how many steps there are to getting the MP3 off anywhere but itunes and onto that thing?)

YWriter is what I use for my writing. It is free, and doesn't have strings attached. And Simon keeps putting in the features he wants, so now it will read things back to me. He's an actual writer Simon Haynes so he has some sense of what's useful.

Quite the little empire Apple's built out of having the first GUI back in the dark ages.

Xerox really came up with most of that interface, fat lot of good it did for them.

3>> All mobile phone companies don't have the same contracts. The emergence of pay-as-you-go at major companies (T-Mobile, Verizon, etc) actually is an excellent example of how it does work to take your business elsewhere. Personally, I'm still on a pay-per minute plan, and paying less than $10/ month for service (but I'm not all that chatty.) Cable and satellite companies are now in fierce competition with streaming services, and are changing as a result.

I think that if we assume people are actually reading their contract, they are making a decision (more neutral than "throwing away") that Apple's marketplace is worth more than all the others combined. I don't believe it's a good decision, but it may be a tactical decision. Those authors could choose differently; they could market through Amazon, through their own websites, or through some other market. The could combine several.

If you are writing a text-book with no other means of support, ie to put food on the table, you probably don't have the background to be writing it in the first place, which means you're more or less screwed from the outset. College professors write text-books, housewives don't.

I can think of quite a few instances where toolmakers control the end product. It's been done by leasing, rather than selling the tool, and by franchising. And in the context of computers--particularly something as proprietary as Apple--it gets very circular. How do you know which is the product and which is the tool? You're seeing it as a single direction flow from tool to product, but I'm a little concerned about the simplicity of that view, and by the idea of injecting it into law.

5>> Didn't know that. Book suggestion, please?

7> You could google Xerox PARC but I did find this article, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell.

>7 karhne:
Dealers of Lightning is what I had read a few years ago. Although I got my facts first from an old CS textbook. It's not a great book and some of the technical details were... muddled. But it was enjoyable.

#6 by karhne> Still disagree. I actually have T-mobile pay-as-you-go. It has severe limitations that are a direct result of it being T-mobile pay-as-you-go (no data whatsoever, even if I'm willing to pay for it per-minute, for one). I shopped around quite heavily for my plan, so I know what's out there. There's really not a lot of great options. There's a big gulf between their non pay-as-you-go products and the pay-as-you-go ones. And that's not even getting into phone compatibilities due to allowing all the different phone companies to conveniently use incompatible technologies.

I also disagree with cable and satellite deals being so amazingly competitive. Have you noticed how all the cable and satellite (and non pay-as-you-go) contracts are all 2 year contracts now? And how if you don't sign up with a contract (when they even allow that), you pay a much more exorbitant rate? That's yet another example of the "well, then just don't go for those deals" theory not working all that great for the consumer. Since when has any consumer ever had a desire to be locked into these contracts for 2 years?

I can think of quite a few instances where toolmakers control the end product. It's been done by leasing, rather than selling the tool, and by franchising.

You're talking about oranges, I'm talking about apples. I'm talking about a tool that creates a product that no longer requires the tool. Like if I paint a canvas, the company that makes the paint doesn't get to set the terms of where I can sell it. Or if I write a piece of code with Visual Studio, Microsoft doesn't have anything to say about where I sell it. It's pretty clear which is the product and which is the tool. If you have some mainstream examples that are directly comparable to this, please give them.

There's really not a lot of great options.

The issue is that most people will choose a bad option over nothing at all, so the companies have no reason to adapt.

I also have T-mobile pay-as-you-go. There are certainly times when I'd like data, but the cost is unreasonable, so I do without.

#11 by _Zoe_> It's that gap between pay for a two year contract, get a superphone for near free, get near-unlimited data, all for $80+/month and no contract, buy your own phone at full price, no data, all for $100/year (that's how it works out for me at least).

The $100/year plan isn't the one I want. It's the one I had to settle for because it's the least-bad-fit for me. And why is it there's nothing in between? Oh yes, because the carrier have it pretty much locked up (even those "independent" are either owned by or pay to use the dominant carriers networks). They don't really care that they're ignoring this market, because they have their more lucrative market to protect. So you take what they're offering or you simply live without a cellphone. Such are the "choices".

I don't really want to wind up in a world a couple of decades down the line where all the major operating system makers and programming tool makers have found out what a great market can be had by writing terms into their EULAs saying their company gets dibs on your products, simply because you used their product while making it.