There's no implication that you give up your copyrights to apple. They won't allow you to sell iBooks elsewhere, that's it. It's not exactly pro-open market but

There's no implication that you give up your copyrights to apple. They won't allow you to sell iBooks elsewhere, that's it. It's not exactly pro-open market but that's Apple: musicians and app developers already knuckle under. The real disturbing part is this: Apple censors worse than China, and books tend to be provocative, a lot more than music or apps. They essentially want to act as a publisher too, but without taking any risks on the part of authors. I sincerely hope for good literature that ibooks ends to be a flop. In any case the problem will be solved with 3rd party tools that take an iBook and convert it to (swf|html|exe) that people can sell anywhere they want. Surely apple cannot claim that the output of a conversion program belongs to them as well. Although it would be interesting to see how they react when the first ibook-to-iOS App converter appears.