iBook Author exclusivity

Apple’s new iBook Author software looks pretty cool. If I was going to write a book, I’d certainly be tempted to use it.

It’s interesting that the license agreement contains a little fuck you Amazon … all books created with iBook Author must be sold via the iBookstore (if you give the book away for free you can do whatever you want).

As far as I know, Kindle has a much bigger share of the ebook market than iBooks. But iPad has a much bigger share of the tablet device market. It’s typical and expected of Apple to try to leverage its share in devices across to content by providing cool tools to content developers. And cut out the publishers in the meantime – very disruptive.

Seems like a good response would be for Amazon to release similar software for authors. Not sure if they can match Apple’s polish though.

Update: Josh Gans points out the author agreement is not quite exclusive, you can take the content produced by iBooks and assemble it in another program and sell it through another channel.