4 ms·
I had the kindle app for about a year before iBooks came out. I bought some books, but having had an unfortunate incident with Amazon taking a book I'd bought
by nika 16y ago
I had the kindle app for about a year before iBooks came out. I bought some books, but having had an unfortunate incident with Amazon taking a book I'd bought away from me in the past, I didn't invest much time in it.
The Kindle app is so clunky it might as well be a webpage.
Once iBooks came out, the experience was so much better that I was happy to switch. I now have several hundred books in iBooks, including all of my technical books, lots of free books, pdfs, DRM free ebooks from people like pragmatic programmers.
If amazon were to release books in a DRM free epub format, I'd buy them and read them in iBooks too.
But for all the gnashing of teeth and exclamations from people who seem to think this is the Great Tragedy of The Ages, I'm amazed that after so long people haven't figured out Apple's priorities.
Apple does right by the customer. It is the key to their success. non-discriminatory pricing is right by the customer. consistent-terms across sales methods is right by the customer, and by the developer.
Imagine if subscriptions were only %10 while sales were %30-- suddenly instead of buying your apps we'd go back to the way things were before liberated the mobile landscape, where if you wanted Doom on your phone, you had to pay $2.99 a month to rent it.
- chc 16y agoYou seem to be glossing over a lot of details to make this sound like a good thing, just because you like Apple and you don't like Amazon and Apple wins in this situation while Amazon loses. For example, the pricing is discriminatory — Apple doesn't have to pay 30% of all its profits from its competing service to anybody. And shutting out entire classes of apps that are no longer financially viable isn't friendly to the customer. Imagine if Apple didn't take money they hadn't earned at all — suddenly there wouldn't be any problem.
- nika 16y agoYeah, I failed to toe the party line that Apple is evil, and therefore everyone else is good. So long as ideological purity is demanded by ideologues, hacker news will continue to be a thought-free echo chamber.
- chc 16y agoPlease don't try to turn this into drama. That isn't what I said at all. Going overboard in praise of Apple is no better than going overboard in the opposite direction.
- dablya 16y agoIt's either that or "You seem to be glossing over a lot of details to make this sound like a good thing, just because you like Apple and you don't like Amazon and Apple wins in this situation while Amazon loses.". Definitely one of the two...
- metageek 16y ago>If amazon were to release books in a DRM free epub format Note that ibooks doesn't even give the author the option of publishing their ePub without DRM.