Apple’s 30% Vig Begins To Kill eBook Apps

Dear iFlowReader User,

We sent a letter to Apple VP Philip Schiller in September 2009 to confirm our business model. Apple told us they couldn’t guarantee anything – submit the application and they’d let us know after submission. We submitted our new iFlowReader app Apple in November of 2010 and they approved it a few days later. After approval, we made substantial additional investments in licensing fees, integration fees, and server fees so that we could open our ebook store on December 2, 2010. Two months later, Apple changed the rules and put us out of business. They now want 30% of the sale price of any books, which they know full well, is all of our profits and more. What sounds like a reasonable demand when packaged by Apple’s extraordinary public relations department is essentially an eviction notice to all ebook sellers on iOS. After over three years of developing products for iOS during which we had over six million downloads of our BeamItDown iFlowReader products, Apple is giving us the boot by making it financially impossible for us to survive. They want all of the eBook business on iOS and since they have the unilateral power to get it, we are out of business and the iFlow Reader is dead.

Apparently they could not separate the transactional portion from the read-only portion:

You may still be able to read them using iFlow Reader although we cannot guarantee that it will work beyond May 31, 2011.

This is not good news.

Previously here:

The Apple 30% Vig Loophole Lives — Again!
The Apple 30% Vig Loophole Appears
Three Lessons Steve Jobs Has Forgotten

Hacks Have Lives Of Miserable Karaoke

Dennis Potter’s Last Interview, On ‘Nowness’ And His Work

Although there’s a little bit set in the karaoke clubs, obviously karaoke is a metaphor: there’s the music, and you have your little line, you can sing it, and everything is written for you, and that is the way life feels to a lot of people. For some, you haven’t got much space, and even the space you’ve got, although you use your own voice, the words are written for you.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

There are writers out there who lament that they are not bringing in the big bucks.

Not Every “White Person” Is “White”

Paper Tigers: What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?

White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have. Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.

“White people” is stereotyping.

Make it “well-off never-faced-adversity spoiled white people” and I’ll agree.

See Outliers by Gladwell about class socialization.

And let me add this too: Those “white people” are the first ones to crack when they don’t get their way, when their luck runs out, when life finally shows them what it’s really like. They’re the ones to return to the office that fired them with a gun and start shooting people. They’re the ones who slay their own families and then kill themselves because of debt. It’s all arrogance, not confidence. They die in disgrace, ultimately unmasked as the frauds they were while alive and strutting.

Researchers Discover Imagination, Are Shocked

We actually ‘become’ happy vampires or contented wizards when reading a book

It’s 2011 and only now someone is “discovering” this?

Srsly?

I once sat in an advertising agency meeting where the big revelation in research was that people imagined what it would be like if they owned the product.

I sat there, stunned, thinking, These people must be from another effin planet. They aren’t human beings like the rest of us.

How could they not know that?

Previously here:

A Genius Formulation!
The “This Will Make Me That” Syndrome
When There’s No Strength, Sell To Weakness
More On Selling To Weakness

Meaning And Nothing And Everything

I used to like buying used print books.

Until I came across ones that had inscriptions in them.

They had been given as gifts, as presents, as commemorations of events. For birthdays, graduations, promotions, anniversaries.

I could feel the weight of emotions from other people on them.

They made me feel unclean, like a voyeur, an intruder, a thief.

The people were long dead. But they had given the object a meaning.

And here I was, holding that object of meaning, never imagined by those involved that such a day could ever come to make their intimacies public.

The iPad Was Built To Hate CDs

Here is your early morning laugh:

I’m trying to put a cd into the iPad 2 to play a track but the slot underneath the screen won’t allow me. What can I do?

Oh yes, this is a real thread at Apple Support Communities.