iBooks Author: You Work For Apple Now

ARTICLE DATE : January 20, 2012

With iBooks Author, Apple just made a hideous play to kill authors' rights over their work. This doesn't just affect big publishers like Pearson or HarperCollins; it affects every single person who wants to use Apple's new tool to get their word out. Like iBooks Author? Apple now owns you.

The news was so startling, I couldn't believe it when I first read it. The iBooks Author user agreement says that any file output in the iBook format must be sold through Apple's store, and not anywhere else. You can give it away for free, but if you want to sell your work, you can't sell it yourself. You can't find the best financial or distribution deal. You can't offer to email it to your friends for a dollar each so they can read it on their iPads. You must sell it through Apple, which gets a 30 percent cut.

Fortunately, it doesn't look like Apple owns the actual words of your book; it looks, to my non-lawyerly eye, that if you took the text out and reformatted it in a different app you could sell it elsewhere. But I'm not sure of that.

You Work For Apple Now
I'm feeling a personal terror here because I make my living as a writer. I'm writing this column now in Apple's TextEdit. If Apple took the same approach to TextEdit as it does to iBooks, I wouldn't be able to put my columns in PCMag's Digital Edition (sold through Zinio). Apple would control how PCMag does its business.

My wife is an artist; she creates some of her work on a Mac. Could Apple then forbid her from selling it on Etsy or through an art gallery with a little-noticed clause in a licensing agreement? That's what iBook Author heralds.

Up until now, Apple has kept creative tools divorced from the means of distribution. You can choose how to sell the things you made with iWork, iWeb, Xcode, TextEdit, or any app the company has ever written, free or not. Apple has always made a distinction between enabling the creative process and selling the product of that process.

Apple's iBooks Author erases that distinction. Apple owns the creative process of anyone who uses the tool. If you're looking to create an iBook, you've just given Apple total distribution control over your work. That's as good as partial ownership.

There are other creative tools with distribution restrictions. Take Blurb, the online self-publishing tool. If you build a book with Blurb's toolset, you have to pay Blurb to print it. But after that, it's yours. You can sell it at a school bake sale, on eBay, or to your friends. If you make an iBook, it's Apple's forever.

This is also very different than Apple's iOS app lock-in. Apple can safely argue that locking iPhones to the App Store helps keep malware off the platform. In the case of iOS, the restriction is around the playback device rather than the creative process itself. (As Dave Wineman, who discovered the iBooks Author EULA says, "In ensuring that the App Store remains the only legitimate market for iOS apps, Apple doesn't claim any legal rights to the content I create using its Xcode toolset.")

By saying you can distribute free but not paid iBooks yourself, this play becomes solely about dollars, not about curation, illicit content or malware. And by prohibiting iBooks from being resold, shared or sold as printed copies, Apple goes even farther than it did with its original iTunes DRM—which, you may remember, could be "ripped, mixed and burned" from its very start.

iBooks Author may be free, but it's a bad deal.

Yes, You Still Have Choice
I saw this coming years ago, although I may have underestimated Apple's ambition. When I said in 2010 that "the iPad will kill the Mac", I really meant that Apple was trying to shift away from open computing platforms to closed ones where Apple controls the sole means of content distribution.

The Mac App Store is Apple's attempt to bring the closed iOS model to the Mac, and it's flourishing, but it's fortunately flourishing in competition with other software stores. There was just too much inertia around openness on the Mac platform to totally close it down. Mac users have the best of both worlds: they can choose the App Store's ease, or have the freedom to download software from elsewhere. That's a win-win situation.

What's the solution here? Why, don't use iBooks Author, of course. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the e-book creation market. This tool may look appealing, but it's a devil's bargain. I like using Apple products, but I don't want to work for the company.

