Thursday, February 3, 2011

Apple is changing rules again

In case you did not figure out yet, i am a big Apple user, maybe even a big Apple fan. But I am sometimes questioning certain approaches by Apple.

Last week, Apple did deny the Sony reader app for the app store. Not that i am a big fan of Sony, but their app is the only of the t4 big ones which allows me to use the ebook reader to rent books from my local library directly through the reader. This would have been a nice feature on the iPad.

However Apple does not agree on the approach that the user can buy on the iPad books to read on one of the readers without the vendors has to give Apple 30%.

Apple lives by the 30% rule. 30% off the iTunes songs, 30% off the paid app revenue, 30% off the iAds ad so on.

With Kindle on the iPad as an example, you can't buy directly in the app books, you need to go to the amazon website to buy the books. The book is then in the cloud and the app will sync it to your iPad.

Apple wants to avoid this because it does not make any revenue on it. But the question is, if this is even legal?

To make sound it pro customer and more legal, Apple came up with a pretty statement pro customer.
"We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app," Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Let us face this, if Kindle must offer in App buy then Amazon would lose 30% on each book bought through the app.

If i understand the statement correct from Trudy Muller, then the answer is easy.
Kindle should offer a buy for consumers through the iPad app, but there should be two prices. A download now in the app price and a price when the consumer buys the book at amazon through web.
The first amount should be 30% higher than if the user buys outside the app.
Therefore Amazon does comply the ability to buy the book within the app and does not lose money for books bought through the app.

The beauty right now with the kindle app is, that it does not matter on which device the app is, the user can always read all books he bought before.

Does this change with the new terms?

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

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