Apple's famous walled garden is starting to show cracks

Re:Apple's famous walled garden is starting to show cracks by skh on Sunday January 13, 2019 @12:14PM (#18897505)

When the ability to make books for iBooks came out I was excited. I would like to write a math textbook with embedded videos in it. I was about to explore doing this in iBooks but then I realized that I would be limiting my audience to those with Apple devices. I abandoned the idea.

I buy digital books from Amazon and not Apple because I know that Amazon will make its books available on any device. As far as I know iBooks are not available on non-Apple devices. Why would someone lock themselves in? If they made their digital services device agnostic I’d buy from them.

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Re:Apple's famous walled garden is starting to show cracks by Paianni on Sunday January 13, 2019 @12:18PM (#18897534)

Amazon could kill support for any platform at any time if they wish. If I get any eBooks at all I want them to be in an open standard (e.g ePub) with no DRM whatsoever.

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Re:Apple's famous walled garden is starting to show cracks by EdwardCoffin on Sunday January 13, 2019 @12:51PM (#18897727)

And they have a history of doing this. Before they had the Kindle, they sold Adobe digital editions content, and after they made the switch they retired the Adobe digital edition license servers. I lost an ebook I desperately wanted when they did this. They didn't send a warning about the upcoming retirement either, despite the books being registered to email addresses which they could easily have sent alerts to.

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Re:Apple's famous walled garden is starting to show cracks by nanoseltzer on Sunday January 13, 2019 @02:50PM (#18898313)

They probably couldn’t do this to the kindle stuff now at this scale, if that’s any comfort.

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Re:Apple's famous walled garden is starting to show cracks by chipotle_coyote on Sunday January 13, 2019 @12:46PM (#18897704)

I definitely prefer that. Amusingly, most of my DRM-free ebooks are in Apple Books, because it's become a really great reader and it's trivial to get "outside" books into it.

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Re:Apple's famous walled garden is starting to show cracks by skh on Sunday January 13, 2019 @12:41PM (#18897668)

That is certainly true. But given the choice between Amazon or Apple when it comes to digital content I choose Amazon for the reasons given. Maybe they'll lock things down but I doubt it.

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Re:Apple's famous walled garden is starting to show cracks by tomjen3 on Sunday January 13, 2019 @03:20PM (#18898448)

Bean books sells theirs on the kindle store with exactly that requirement.

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