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Will Apple purge e-book ‘appbooks’ from the app store?
March 9, 2010 | 8:15 am
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By Chris Meadows
Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch wonders whether e-books might not be the next type of app to be purged from the App Store. (As we’ve been wondering here for quite some time.)
Though Kincaid makes it clear he does not think e-book readers such as Stanza or Kindle will go, since they provide a great deal of additional functionality themselves, he points out that all of the stand-alone appbooks (especially those that are just a wrapper around a Project Gutenberg public-domain text) cause a great deal of clutter in the e-books category, and would offer an inferior experience to the iBooks interface on a big-screened iPad.
It is worth pointing out that apart from the “sexual apps” purge, Apple has recently begun cracking down on “cookie-cutter” applications—apps built on templates, such as wrappers of simple RSS feeds, that provide similar functionality to a standard mobile webpage. (Ironically, this would probably apply to our own TeleRead iPhone app as well.)
It would seem that a Project Gutenberg e-book in an app wrapper would be no less a “cookie-cutter” app than a RSS feed in an app wrapper. But apparently Apple is limiting itself to blocking new cookie-cutter apps rather than purging existing ones, at least for now.
I almost wonder if I should keep reporting on this sort of speculation, as it does not seem like it is going to be productive to worry about it until we see more concrete actions on Apple’s part. Like Kincaid, I still maintain that Apple has no reason to eliminate alternate e-book reading apps from its store.
Those stand-alone appbooks do cause an awful lot of content clutter, though. I remember when there were only a couple of dozen, but there are now more than 29,000—1,478 pages’ worth. It’s impossible to browse usefully through that much content. Something to make the app store more navigable would be a good idea.
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Comments:
I don’t have an iPhone or Touch, but aren’t some of these apps ‘enhanced’ editions of books? For example the new Kim Harrison book is supposed to not only include the full text, but the full audiobook as well as author interviews and stuff. I wonder if they’d pull all book apps or be selective.
On a side note, it’s funny how the pub can sell this enhanced book for $14.99, but the ebook by itself [without the audiobook] has a higher list than that.
I’m not sure why you think competing ebookstores (those ebook reader apps that let you get new books, and manage your “library”) would be allowed. Isn’t that kind of like allowing competing iTunes or competing browsers on the phone? And I’m not sure it makes much sense to contemplate alternative pure ebook readers, either — will Apple provide an API to let them pull books from the iBookstore-managed collection on your phone?
I share Bill Janssen’s concerns. This is, to my mind, one of the biggest unknowns about the iPad. The only indication I’ve noticed so far giving any clue is that Apple decided not to make its iBooks app one of the default apps pre-loaded on the iPad but a separate download. See http://www.9to5mac.com/cloud_nine_56888
Some say this is because of geographic restrictions imposed by publishers but it is also an indication that iBooks won’t be in the same category as the iPhone versions of iTunes and Safari.
Also, Amazon has said it expects to have a Kindle app for the iPad (http://www.teleread.com/2010/02/18/amazon-confirms-kindle-for-the-ipad/ ), but Google probably would have said it was going to have a Google Voice app for the iPhone until Apple didn’t approve it.