venomous porridge: The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA (via @ener)
Apple just released iBooks Author, a free Mac app for creating digital books for the new version of iBooks. I haven’t played with it much, but so far it looks like a very good tool. However, a curious thing happens when you go to export your work in iBooks format:
This restriction — that iBooks can be sold only in the iBookstore — isn’t enforced on a technical level. You can save the document, move it to your iPad in any of the usual ways (including just emailing it to yourself), and it happily opens in the iBooks app.
But if you look at the end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author, accessible via the app’s About box, the following bold note appears at the top:
…
Click through for details on iBook Authors EULA. It’s really interesting to see Apple take such an approach towards a product. It’s unheard of that a company controls the outcome of a product - as Wineman says:
It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty…
It will be really interesting to see how users react to Apples decision, and whether that will stop anyone from using iBook Author as their authoring tool.
(via @ener)
