Chris Brakebill

You don’t get to use this free tool to produce books that you sell directly to customers, circumventing Apple’s store. Think about the textbook business, where a publisher might sell thousands of copies of the same book to each school district. This isn’t just about selling iPads — Apple wants its 30 percent.

I’m not sure this is a right Apple gets. Making the software free doesn’t make it okay to tell you what you can do with the output of the software. If Microsoft made Word free that wouldn’t make it understandable for them to want control of your documents.

Schools will usually hold onto the paper versions of textbooks for about five years, meaning the publishers are only recouping about $15 per year anyway. Via the iBookstore, textbooks can be sold directly to students (who may or may not be offered payment vouchers from their schools), and from the publishers’ perspective, the beauty of this arrangement is that those books can’t be re-used or re-sold.

This is why I was hesitant in college to get excited about digital textbooks. I could usually buy used books and sell them so that I lost little money (and occasionally profited). I figured digital textbooks meant spending a large chunk of money and then having no resale value. But at prices like this, I could totally get on board.

Just iPad. No silly numbers. Come this summer the Apple lineup will be much cleaner.