Fortune reports Merril Lynch analysts believe that Apple’s new in-app purchase policy could cost Amazon $80 to $160 million per year in lost revenue from Kindle sales. However, on his blog “@chuckdude,” Chuck Toporek writes about why he thinks Amazon isn’t worried over the matter of Apple’s in-app purchasing fee changes. He notes that Amazon has been working on Kindle for the Web, which will soon bring the full text of Kindle e-books to web browsers.
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.
Booki.sh and their open source Monocle web reader of ebooks (I am not affiliated) is perfect example of how you can have books on the web that are fully cached by the browser, and readable offline.
Yes, HTML 5 web apps can stash a number of eBooks in a local mySQL database for offline reading. Safari (mobile & desktop), Chrome and Firefox all qualify. The preeminent example for ePub in this genre of eReaders is Ibis Reader from Threepress Consulting.
However, there is one “gotcha” in that this doesn’t work for ePubs that contain audio or video. Apparently, the HTML 5 standard has no way to launch such media from within a web page cached in local storage. This will become particularly painful as EPUB v3, which supports embedded audio & video, is deployed beyond the iBooks.app.
Even with cacheing, I’m skeptical that web-based reading will be as good or as feature-rich as a dedicated app. It’s certainly not an option I’d want to get stuck with.
Let’s hope that Bezos’ silence doesn’t reflect an unwillingness to take Apple to court over this matter or, perhaps better, to bankroll a large class action suit by Kindle app users who bought iDevices at least in part to read books they’ve bought from Amazon. Amazon knows who we are.
Remember that companies often lose class action lawsuits when they promise at the time of sale what they don’t later deliver. That can at least be excused by claiming that the promise proved impossible to fulfill.
In this case Apple is doing something far less defensible. It is failing to continue to deliver what they were delivering at the time of sale. When we bought Apple mobile devices, we did so knowing that they ran the Kindle app. The only rationale for removing it is something that is seriously to our benefit (dangerous bugs or security holes) rather than Apple profits. Apple can’t bait us with the Kindle app and then switch us the an iBookstore that has far fewer titles. That’s both unethical and something the courts are likely to rule illegal.
Apple hasn’t yanked the Kindle app yet, they’ve merely beat up on Sony, a minor player in the ebook market. Let’s hope they step back from the precipice, make it clear that the Kindle app is here to stay, and focus on making the iBookstore a better competitor to Amazon. Right now, the competition isn’t even close and I find that disappointing.