The central problem with Ed Bott's article is here: "Apple has chosen to leverage its dominant position in the tablet market to try to hobble its competitors i

The central problem with Ed Bott's article is here: "Apple has chosen to leverage its dominant position in the tablet market to try to hobble its competitors in the ebook-publishing business. " This is total bullshit. If Apple wanted to "hobble their competitors" with their tablet share they would probably have done so by banning Amazon's Kindle app and they would have done it (for real) years ago. This has little to do with tablet share other then Apple's only play for a successful niche was to play to the ipad's advantages over Amazon's suite of devices. Don't get me wrong I'm sure they do want to "hobble their competitors" just like everyone else does it's just they aren't the 900 pound gorilla in the ebook market. What Apple's doing here is quite simple. They are building a niche to start to attack Amazon with. They had to innovate it in a completely new direction because of the huge Kindle lock in moat Amazon has built {Apple knows a thing or two about lock in}. So they needed to innovate and be the leader somewhere, anywhere. Interactivity and textbooks are what they decided on. Ed Bott thinks Apple should just sell the same textbook as Amazon plus a widget. Apple probably thought about that but realized the plus a widget version would cost extra and people/school districts would buy the cheaper version from Amazon or whoever. So they went the exclusive route. Here's out format, here's the tools that make it easy, and here's the catch: sell on our store only. It's that simple. It had to be exclusives. Ed Bott thinks Apple is evil but he should look at the score over the last 2 years: iBooks is getting raped by Kindle and Ed Bott's claimed solution wasn't gonna change that.