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By Chris Meadows

schiller A couple of weeks ago, Macintosh developer Steven Frank said on his blog that he was giving up his iPhone in disgust at Apple’s behavior with regard to App Store approvals. A little later, he blogged on how Apple had since improved in some ways (such as canning a notable app store copyright troll) but worsened in that it was apparently rejecting e-book applications. (TeleRead’s David Rothman also remarked on this story).

Well, Frank has now posted that he has received an email from Apple Vice President Phil Schiller, who previously emailed John Gruber over the NinjaWords dictionary app censorship issue. Unlike Gruber, Frank does not quote the e-mail verbatim. However, he does write:

[Schiller] went on to say that the rumors of widespread e-book app rejection I’d heard were false — that specifically one e-book app had been rejected because it facilitated iPhone-to-iPhone sharing of (potentially copyrighted) books. But that otherwise, there was no sweeping ban on e-book readers.

It is good that Apple is putting in the effort to try to salvage its image at long last (though as MG Siegler of TechCrunch notes, it is a bit odd that the long silence is being broken by a VP rather than Apple’s own PR team). Still, from an e-book point of view, it is too bad that this is the extent of the remarks that are available explaining this rejection. I would have liked to know more about it.

It is also a bit sad that the ability to share e-books directly from device to device is a criterion for rejection now. I well remember the days when one of the neatest things about the Palm Pilot was that you could beam e-books and other documents between devices.

Peanut Reader (now eReader) even explicitly let you do it with encrypted (hence, copyrighted) books—you just had to enter your credit card number on the other device to unlock it. Thus, you could share the e-book with a friend, but it had to be one who was close enough for you to be able to enter your info on his device.

And I have a hard time seeing how being able to transfer books from iPhone to iPhone is substantially worse than being able to transfer them from a desktop computer to an iPhone, or even a webpage to an iPhone.

But Apple is to a large extent a media company now, and in close relationships with other media companies. So naturally it cannot afford to be seen as doing anything that might potentially promote copyright violation.

Pity.

 
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