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.

Publishers are clearly leaving money on the table here. Even if they cannot give up the dead tree model, they could offer something like iTunes Match for books and provide digital versions to people who have bought physical books. Or allow people to swap a physical book that they own for a digital version. Since the self scanning process destroys the book anyway and it sounds like a lot of trouble, people should be willing to pay something to exchange their physical book for a digital file. And since the publishers presumably already have the books in some sort of digital format, the marginal cost should be pretty close to zero. Sounds like a real win win is possible.