This is, of course, Amazon’s end run around Apple’s restrictions on in-app purchases—a way to provide an iPad-based Kindle store without having to give Apple 30% of its revenue. (An iPhone version will reportedly be out soon.) It looks just like any other application on the iPad, but as a web app it is not subject to Apple’s requirements. It looks very well-polished, and will undoubtedly help drive more revenue to Amazon.

First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari itself, but the Kindle Reader at least does it simply and well. People who are in the habit of reaching for the Kindle app first will undoubtedly be happy to be able to use it for PDFs, too.

The other change is a bit more important, however: for the first time, the app allows (almost) the same access to periodical subscriptions as the hardware Kindle. (The “almost” comes in if you have a subscription to something, such as the New York Times, that specifically only allows direct Kindle hardware integration.) This is one of the major hardware features that has been noticeably absent from Kindle apps, and it will undoubtedly come as a welcome addition for those who use it on their readers and had wanted to on their iOS devices.

I just noticed something else about the Kindle app that I imagine it has had for a while and I just never noticed: the ability to sideload your own DRM-free content onto it (and pull downloaded content off of it) through the iTunes apps tab. I never noticed this before, though I hadn’t looked in a while. Of course, for all I know it may have had it since sideloading through iTunes was even possible; I just know that its lack was something I complained about when the app first launched.

Of the major ebooksellers, it appears Nook is the last app standing. Will it release a trimmed-down app in the coming hours? (I should note that the real agent behind the release schedule is likely Apple’s own approval team—it’s quite possible the updated Nook app is already in the pipeline.)

Under the current form of Apple’s in-app purchase guidelines, apps such as Amazon’s Kindle app can continue allowing users to download externally-purchased content as long as there is no link or button within the app to redirect the iPhone user to the external purchasing source.

At the time of the policy’s announcement, All Things Digital reported that a memo from Apple to publishers had set a deadline of June 30 for compliance. However, sources tell Macworld that the deadline was less of a hard-and-fast date than a rough target for bringing apps into line with the new policy.

InfoWorld notes that various iPhone apps such as Hulu Plus and Netflix have already updated to remove links. Netflix includes a “Visit netflix.com to sign up” notice on the login screen, but does not provide an actual link to launch the browser. It expects that the Kindle, Nook, and Google Books apps will also have their web-store buttons removed in the near future.

It is annoying that Apple, who has previously built its business on making things more convenient for its users, is now taking options away, but on the bright side those who’ve bought e-books from these stores will continue to be permitted to download them to the iPhone.

[Original post follows.]

Despite all the threats, blog outrage, and speculation around Apple’s new rules for content apps over the past several months, as of this morning the three major ebooksellers’ apps already available on Apple’s App Store—Kindle, Nook, and Kobo—remain unchanged and available for download. (Sony never got a chance to play.)

Kindle and Nook both offer a link to their respective websites, while Kobo actually lets you shop their store from within the app itself. Both features are forbidden by Apple’s new guidelines, but perhaps the companies have worked out special agreements with Apple—or Apple is simply backlogged on its app approval process.

Apple certainly hasn’t seen fit to go to some of the lengths Amazon or Barnes and Noble have for providing more avenues of sale for their books. There is as yet no desktop e-book reader for iBooks books, for instance. (Indeed, since iBooks requires OS 4, it’s not even compatible with all the Apple handheld devices that Amazon and B&N’s apps support—I can read a Kindle or Nook book on my 1st-generation iPod Touch, but I’ll never read an iBook there.)

For all that we have Apple in large part to blame for the agency pricing that now infects the e-book industry, they haven’t seemed to do much with it—except produce the fairly ominous pronouncement that all apps with content stores (which presumably includes e-book stores) are going to have to kick in a 30% cut to Apple. And that means Apple is effectively going to kick those stores out of its platform, making it that much less attractive to future would-be purchasers who already have an investment in Kindle or Nook books.

I find iBooks to be a pretty enough e-book reading app, for the EPUBs I’ve purchased elsewhere—but I would never buy an e-book from them. Not when I can read Kindle and Nook ones in so many other places. I wonder if Apple has any idea just how much it’s going to harm its devices’ market when it kicks the other stores out.

It turns out that Orange submitted the iOS app at the same time as Apple announced its in-app purchasing policy change, requiring applications to direct in-app purchases through the app store, to the tune of a 30% cut of the revenue.

An Orange spokeswoman said, "Orange had submitted the Apple app at the same time as the Android app, but at the time of submission Apple changed their policy, so Orange is now changing their app to meet with that new policy."

Oddly, Apple has approved recent app updates from Kobo, Amazon, and Netflix, all of which are expected to be affected by the in-app purchase requirements, but all of which still do not incorporate those changes. Of course, there is a grace period that is set to expire June 30th, but it seems strange that these companies would continue upgrading their apps anyway if they knew that they were going to have to pull them in June.

Curiouser and curiouser. I suspect it will be at least July before we fully understand just how all this is going to shake out.

Which, in turn, was a good excuse to get around to reviewing the new Nook e-reader for the iPad, iPhone, and Windows Desktop and see how much it has changed since breaking away from being a reskinned version of Fictionwise’s eReader. In the process I found some good things and a couple of less good things. In general, I’d say the Nook Reader is all right as a method of reading e-books—about as good or bad as any other commercial e-reader. There are a few areas where it could stand to improve, however.

Readability

The Windows desktop version of the Nook Reader seems a lot like it’s trying to be the Kindle reader. It uses a lot of the same features: two-column view (toggleable if you want in the settings), simple controls for adjusting font size and margin. (Though unlike with Amazon’s Windows app, the Nook reader actually allows you to choose the font size by point, rather than just giving you a slider.) The desktop version does not allow you to turn full justification off, though this isn’t as bad on a screen the size of a desktop display as it would be on the iPad or iPhone.

The iPad version also offers a two-column view in landscape mode, though unlike iBooks doesn’t bother trying to pretend you’re looking at a printed page. As with most iPad e-reading apps, there’s a toolbar that can be summoned or hidden with a tap on the screen.

You can choose to view the book in the “publisher settings”—presumably, the settings that are encoded into the original EPUB file—or make your own font, margin, line spacing, justification, and color choices. The number of configuration options are not as comprehensive as something like Stanza or Bookshelf offers, but tend to be a good bit more so than most other apps on the iPad, including the Kindle app.

Publisher settings usually tend to include full justification sans hyphenation. and it’s good that the Nook allows you to turn that off—since it’s not (legally) possible to use my preferred solution of reprocessing the EPUB files through Calibre to set them left-justified by default. The other settings give you a reasonable amount of control over how the text is presented on the screen.

The same can’t quite be said for the iPhone version of the app, though. Trying to read the book in that, I’m taken back to my recollection of using the Mobipocket client on my old Visor Deluxe, shaking my head, and going back to iSilo: there’s just not enough text on the page!

Now, to be fair, this can be adjusted somewhat using the settings, but there simply aren’t as many choices as in the iPad version. There’s either no margin at all—you can see how the text nearly touches the border on both of these iPod Touch screenshots—or a big one that looks like it’s in a picture frame. It can’t be adjusted between those extremes. The full justification of the publisher preference also looks a good bit worse here (and even more so with the picture-frame margin).

I think in part it may be due to B&N’s choice to use both paragraph indents and a blank line between paragraphs. More and more, especially with iBooks as my main iPad EPUB reader now, my preference is to use just indentation, not the blank lines. That’s why I use Calibre to remove the blank lines and add a paragraph indent to every non-DRM’d EPUB I buy. My printed books don’t have that wasted blank space between every paragraph, and I don’t want my e-books to either. (For some reason, Stanza on my iPod Touch disregards the indents and adds the blank lines back, but since it’s just doing one or the other, not both, I can live with it.)

Of course, I can’t (legally) do that with the DRM-locked EPUBs I buy from B&N, so I just have to put up with it.

And one more bit of readability weirdness: on the iPhone and iPad versions, the first paragraph or so of every chapter (or at least every chapter of these Young Wizards books) is always fully justified even if you set full justification off. I imagine it’s something to do with the chapter header.

Ease of Use

As with most e-book applications, it’s simple enough that using it isn’t too hard. The controls are easy enough to work, and as mentioned above the configuration options are pretty comprehensive but not so much so as to be confusing. As with the Kindle app, you simply tap to move forward and backward. (Or for the desktop app, you can page up and down, or use the mouse scroll wheel.

In the lower right corner of the screen is a corner with a + in it that can be tapped to “dog-ear” the page for later reference. Words can also be marked to highlight, add a note, or search them in a dictionary, Google, or Wikipedia. Notes, highlights, and bookmarks can be looked up in the table of contents found under the “go to” menu bar option.

The PC app has a slightly different version of this—a ribbon you can pull down in the upper left corner. (In this way, it shows its ancestry back to the eReader desktop app, which used the same method.) Words can be highlighted and noted in the same way, and bookmarks, highlights, and notes can be accessed from the hidable control panel at left.

Like the Kindle app, the Barnes & Noble e-reader is supposed to let you keep track of where you’ve read to in different devices. However, while I was testing it on different devices, I never could seem to make it work properly. I’m not sure if it was just the way I was using it, or what, but it just didn’t seem to work for me.

Adding Content

As far as the iPhone and iPad apps are concerned, the only way to add content is to buy it from the Barnes & Noble e-book store. It used to be that, as with Fictionwise’s eReader using ereader://, you could enter a URL starting with “bnereader://” in Mobile Safari to side-load content when the Nook reader was a reskinned eReader, but no longer; the last time I tried, a bnereader:// URL just launched the reader but didn’t actually load content into it.

(Weirdly, you can now side-load unDRM’d Mobipocket files into the Kindle reader (on iOS 4.* devices at least) via the “File Sharing” section of the Apps sync tab in iTunes. I wonder when that happened? But there is no sign of the same ability for unDRM’d EPUBs for the Nook reader yet!)

Once you’ve bought a Nook book on the B&N website, you can use the Nook reader to download it and read it. But forget about adding an unencrypted EPUB file from your own computer; as far as I know it can’t be done. (Though if there’s a way I’m missing, I’d love to hear about it.)

The desktop reader can load DRM-free EPUB or PDF files, under the “my stuff” section of “my library”, and read it the same as any other B&N e-book. But weirdly, once a file has been added to “my stuff”, there’s no way I can find to remove it. As far as I can tell, it’s there for good (unless someone else knows a way I’ve been missing).

While the B&N e-reader is all right for reading EPUB books, I don’t know that I’d use it for any that I didn’t have to (such as those ones you get from B&N with DRM on them). The matter of line spacing and justification, and the DRM that prohibits fixing them, make me inclined to say that If it were not currently illegal, I would be inclined to advise stripping the DRM from any B&N e-books you buy and reading them in your DRM-free EPUB reader of choice.

Of course, if Apple holds firm with its in-app purchase requirements, whether to use the Nook reader could soon become academic.

Taken together, the pieces make some good arguments. The Kindles have always been loss leaders—Amazon makes its money off the e-books (especially now that agency pricing is forcing Amazon to take a 30% cut of every e-book rather than treating the e-books as loss leaders too). That’s why Amazon has been so good about getting a Kindle reader app onto every major mobile platform. Kindle owners tend to buy more books than non-owners, and getting more Kindles into more people’s hands could accelerate the growth of the overall e-book market.

The synergy would also work the other way around: Amazon’s highly-profitable Prime program would become attractive to even more consumers, leading more of them to shift their purchasing habits to buy more physical goods from Amazon, as well as e-books.

Some people have been a bit skeptical of the idea, though. They point out that not every Prime member would necessarily want a Kindle—they subscribed to get no-cost 2-day shipping on their orders, and Kindle e-books aren’t shipped at all. On the other hand, it’s hard to say no to “free”, and it’s a demonstrated fact that often people don’t care for gadgets they don’t have until they get them, then after they use them they discover they can’t do without them. (My parents and cell phones, for example.)

Even if the free Kindle recipients turn around and eBay them or give them to friends or relatives, someone ends up with that extra Kindle, and it still grows the market and gives Amazon additional market share. And who knows? Perhaps Barnes & Noble might just follow suit. And if that’s the case, the e-reader market is going to get that much harder for smaller companies to break even in.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the reason we haven’t heard Jeff Bezos screaming about this recent change to the IAP rules is because Amazon isn’t worried. They have a solution already in beta testing and it works just fine. Instead of using the Kindle app, iOS users can just point Safari to Amazon’s site, buy the Kindle ebook, and read it right there in Safari. No app required.

Of course, the problem with this is that it leaves people like me, who have iPod Touch or iPad models that only support wifi, out in the cold if we’re away from the net. Even the cloud-based Google Books offers an offline reading app for iOS, after all (though I wonder if it will continue to do so after the in-app purchase change takes effect).

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

It seems that Apple considers this plan to be of a piece with magazine and other apps that offer subscriptions. MG Siegler writes at TechCrunch:

Readability details the rejection and their feeling on it on their blog today (which is down at the moment). But let’s just say they’re not happy. The point of Readability is to give the majority of the earnings (70 percent) back to publishers. If Apple is taking a 30 percent cut, the service will either have to cut those payouts to 40 percent, or cut their own take down to 10 percent — neither of which they want to or are willing to do.

The team is angry because they’re not actually selling any content. Instead, they simply offer a service with a monthly fee. In other words, they’re software-as-a-service. And based on what we’re hearing, they’re hardly the only such app getting rejected on the same grounds. But when things like Salesforce apps start getting rejected, will heads really start to roll?

Siegler then incorrectly calls Readability a “key Apple partner” in the past due to their code’s inclusion in Safari as the new “Safari Reader” function (actually, the coders were surprised to discover their open-sourced code had been included, as Apple never told them). (He subsequently changed the post to correct this after I pointed it out in a comment.)

Apple’s move has already raised doubts over the continued viability of the Kindle application. The Bookseller gathers and summarizes a number of sources suggesting that trouble lies ahead. Apple has stated that bookselling apps such as the Kindle app will be expected to abide by these rules, which means an irresistible force and an immovable object may just be on a collision course.

And PaidContent reports that Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission regulators are starting to look into Apple’s plans, which brings up the interesting question of just what market is applicable in this situation.

In order for a real antitrust to be built against Apple, it would have to be shown to dominate some type of market, and defining the market is often the most complex and difficult part of an antitrust case. Is the relevant market tablet computers? In that market, Apple is truly dominant, at least for now, and a reasonable case could be made that publishers don’t have other serious options. But perhaps the relevant market is actually digital media as a whole? Consumers today have loads of options to consume media, and if they’re willing to do it on connected desktop, much of it is essentially free.

Meanwhile, it appears Readability won’t be getting that customized version of Instapaper for iOS after all. They’ll be sticking to the web for now.

"Keep in mind that his [Bezos'] background is engineering and computer science, so more than likely he signed off on this whole ‘locations’ idea as it would seem quite logical to someone with an engineering background," Ron Jaffe posted on January 28. "Indications from the media are that Jeff really is concerned about the ‘customer experience,’ so perhaps he’s just not aware of the mass discontent…no, HATRED that exists for the ‘locations’ way of handling pages."

“Hatred”? Really?

The most important argument against it seems to deal with academic citations (which would also be in keeping with Sayre’s Law, as originally formulated). Some people are concerned over whether academic institutions will be willing to accept that form of citation. A counter-suggestion is just picking a standard medium size font and setting page numbers based on that—but Carnoy fails to point out that this falls down in that not everyone is going to be using a Kindle. “Pages” on the Kindle app on my iPod Touch would be numbered considerably differently than on a Kindle reader, and both would be numbered differently than in the Kindle app on my iPad. But a given location number will apply to any of them.

Of course, part of the problem is the very fuzziness of those numbers. My Kindle might show me locations 20-25 of a book, while my iPod Touch might only show me 21-22. So it might be a little tricky to find the exact location of a given quote when cited that way—it could be on one of two or more screens, depending on the reader size. But then, even a single page number can encompass several paragraphs or more of text, and citations can be split across multiple page numbers too.

But I think some of the fuss is overwrought. The academic community tends to be at least a bit flexible in terms of citations. As I pointed out a couple of months ago, citation methods exist for e-books now, independent of page number. They also exist for things like world wide web pages, which didn’t exist at all just over twenty years ago, and also don’t have page numbers. I have little doubt that the academic community will adapt to location numbers just fine.

The CNet article also includes a reader poll on opinions for, against, and apathetic to the Kindle’s location numbering scheme. At the time of this article’s writing, it has received 648 votes and is currently running neck and neck for and against the scheme—each has 42% of the vote.

It’s no surprise that speculation has been rife about whether Apple was going to kill other e-book apps on its iOS platform ever since in-app purchases were first made available, and again when Apple launched iBooks. After all, apps like eReader and Kindle and Nook and Kobo allow people to buy and download content completely outside the auspices of its in-app purchase store, without Apple getting its 30% cut of the take. So far all our paranoia has come to naught.

But that may be changing. I’ve already mentioned Apple’s prohibition on providing free e-subscriptions to print subscribers, and the Belgian anti-trust investigation it has provoked., but Monday Note has a look at an issue that’s related but not quite the same.

It seems that, since the implementation of in-app purchases, Apple has historically allowed the purchase of magazine subscriptions by redirection to the magazines’ web sites (just as they’ve allowed Amazon, Fictionwise/eReader, Kobo, and others to sell e-books from their websites that could be downloaded into the iOS e-book app). These purchases, since they were made outside the in-app purchase store, also don’t give Apple its 30% take.

But it does not appear that this situation is going to last.

The bad news hardly came as a surprise to many of us who found strange that Apple allowed content providers to bypass its transaction system for the most promising part of their revenue stream. In the long run, how could Apple limit itself to its 30% cut on a $0.99 purchase, and leave a $100 or $150 yearly subscription unmolested? It was just a matter of time before Apple decided to plug this revenue leak. The grace period was probably the time needed to build a subscription system able to match the App Store’s global scale.

And so for the last three months, Apple has been rejecting magazine apps that use the subscription loophole, and subsequently emailing the developers calling attention to section 11.2 of the App Store Review Guidelines:

11.2     Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected

And, the e-mail noted:

For existing apps already on the App Store, we are providing a grace period to bring your app into compliance with this guideline. To ensure your app remains on the App Store, please submit an update that uses the In App Purchase API for purchasing content, by June 30, 2011.

The Monday Note article does not say one word about e-books or e-book apps, but if Apple intends to enforce this provision across the board, it could have the effect of killing off every commercial e-book app except for iBooks. I find it highly doubtful that Amazon, eReader, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or any other e-book company is going to be willing to sacrifice 30% of its iOS revenue to Apple—or that consumers would be willing to buy the e-books if the stores raised their prices to compensate. If they were even allowed to raise the prices under agency pricing.

But I also find it hard to believe that Apple would be willing to kill off all other e-book apps, given that they help to produce demand for Apple’s pricey device which has a lot higher margins than iBooks e-books, at no cost to Apple itself. After all, e-book reading is widely considered to be one of the iPad’s killer apps. But if they don’t cost Apple anything, they’re also not making it any money, which is something it’s going to be trying to squeeze out of magazine publishers.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this all works out.

Of course, as the article points out, the millions of devices Amazon is selling are only part of the story. Amazon has also been coming out with software for just about every other hand-held device operating system in use today, including an upcoming version for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system.

It’s a pity that the only way to get sales figures for Amazon is for an insider to leak them. Still, it’s interesting to learn how well Amazon’s devices have (supposedly) been selling. Just imagine how many they’ll move next year.

It seems fairly obvious that the impetus for this is to compete with Rupert Murdoch’s forthcoming iPad newspaper, and other iPad paper and magazine publishing projects. Apple is still having difficulty coming to terms with publishers who want more control over their e-publications than Apple is willing to provide—and iPad magazines are still unable to offer subscriptions.

And of course these papers and magazines can also be read (to some extent) on Android-equipped cell phones, not just the larger tablets. They might not be able to offer the same interactivity as iPad app-gazines, but on the other hand those iPad apps have not necessarily been making the best use of that interactivity to begin with. If people just want to read them like e-books, Amazon is going to have them covered.

(Found via Fast Company.)