I won’t be sympathetic to Amazon’s wailing over Apple shafting them. As far as I’m concerned Amazon started this crap by not going with ePub for eBooks and for locking everyone into its store. This is greed blowback. This is what happens with greed: It creates it own revenge effect.
It’s ironic that Sony got dinged by Apple and wound up blowing the in-app purchasing whistle on them. When Sony in America decided to give eBooks a go, they went with ePub and made repeated efforts to please their customers with upgrades and even generous trade-ins of the original model 500. If Sony can be faulted for anything, it’s for not waking up to wireless commerce sooner but that has nothing to do with the matter at hand.
Barnes & Noble can’t squawk, either. It mutated the Adobe DRM everyone was using, breaking the universality of ePub and further gave everyone the Finger of Greed by rebranding its eBooks as Nookbooks. I have zero sympathy for them getting stabbed by Apple.
Kobo/Borders both did the right thing going with universal ePub and standard Adobe DRM. It’s too bad Borders didn’t wake up sooner and now has a doubtful future. It deserves to survive more than Barnes & Noble.
I’m frankly shocked at the position Apple is taking. Like some of Reagan’s questionable decisions that were later explained as symptoms of encroaching Alzheimer’s disease, I wonder if what Jobs is letting happen is a sign of a metastatic brain tumor affecting his judgment? You can yell all you want about my bringing up his health in what seems to be a very tasteless manner, but this greed grab by Apple needs to be explained and, as with Reagan, illness seems to be a possible explanation.
Steve Jobs once stated his goal was to make a ding in the universe. Right now, he’s the laughingstock of it.
