TextSearch

By JOHN GRUBER ARCHIVE THE TALK SHOW DITHERING PROJECTS CONTACT COLOPHON FEEDS / SOCIAL SPONSORSHIP OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity chose WorkOS over building it themselves. I’ma Set It Straight, This Watergate Tuesday, 24 January 2012 Ed Bott, “How Apple Is Sabotaging an Open Standard for Digital Books”: Apple’s behavior is a modern, sophisticated version of the “embrace, extend, and extinguish” behavior that got Microsoft in so much trouble in the 1990s: Enter a product category supporting a widely used standard, extend that standard with proprietary capabilities, and then use those differences to disadvantage competitors. (The strategy is even more effective if you have a dominant market position in another, related category that you can use for leverage. Think Windows in the 1990s, iPad in 2012.) I agree with Bott that Apple is being competitive here, but disagree that it’s an example of embrace/extend/extinguish. Put another way, over the weekend Bott called the iBooks Author EULA “mind-bogglingly greedy and evil”; I agree with the greedy, but not the evil or the mind-bogglingliness. So Apple, which claims to use the ePub format exclusively, has now created an incompatible, proprietary version of that format. And with iBooks Author they’ve added licensing terms that restrict what an author can do with the generated content. This is why I disagree with the comparison to Microsoft’s embrace/extend/extinguish strategy: Apple isn’t calling the new iBooks Author format “ePub”. They never mentioned “ePub” during last week’s event. iBooks Author doesn’t use “ePub” anywhere in the user interface or documentation. The filename extension is ‘.ibooks’, not ‘.epub’. Arguing that Apple is following the embrace/extend/extinguish strategy implies that Apple was attempting to redefine “ePub” to mean “ePub plus Apple proprietary extensions”. Apple isn’t doing that. They’re very clearly presenting the output of iBooks Author as something new and proprietary to the iBooks Author. Bott points to this iBooks FAQ from Apple, which states that the only formats supported by iBooks are industry-standard ePub and PDF. Given that the modification date on this FAQ is 22 December 2011, it seems clear that this is simply an outdated FAQ, not an attempt to describe the new iBooks format as ePub. I’m not trying to be cute here. I understand that technically, under the hood, the iBooks Author output is standard ePub plus Apple proprietary extensions. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that Apple is attempting to confuse anyone in this regard. The under-the-hood similarities to ePub are an implementation detail. No casual user creating a work in iBooks Author should have any reason to believe they are creating an ePub file, or something that can be used anywhere other than in the iBooks app on an iPad. I don’t disagree that Apple’s goal is for the proprietary iBooks format to become a de facto standard — for it to become popular and widely used and thus, because it only works on the iPad, further cement the iPad as the leading next-generation personal computing platform. I simply disagree that Apple is being in any way disingenuous or misleading about it. The only people who seem to be confused about iBooks Author’s relationship to ePub are technically-minded people who know exactly what ePub is and who have a vested interest in seeing the open standard become the de facto industry standard. Bott writes: They also could have included the option to import ePub files. As a publisher and author myself, I would have welcomed that option. I could create a book using the industry-leading standard ePub format, for sale in any outlet, then import it into iBooks Author, add interactive elements, and sell an enhanced version in the iTunes Store for the same price. What Bott is asking for here, to me, would have been a more embrace/extend/extinguish sort of move — to allow iBooks Author to open a cross-platform ePub book, make changes, and then save it in a proprietary format that can only be read in iBooks. It might have been a convenience to authors and publishers who already have ePub source files, but by not even allowing iBooks Author to import ePub, it only serves to emphasize that iBooks Author is not a general-purpose ePub or e-book tool. It is an iBooks tool. Apple, which uses the ePub standard as the core for iBooks, could easily have produced their free authoring tool so that it continues to support what they acknowledge is the “industry-leading standard.” The program could offer users a choice of output formats: a standard ePub file or a fully interactive iBooks file. They could have, but they didn’t. And if they had, when exporting to standard ePub, the books would lose all of the formatting and interactive features that are exclusive to the iBooks format. Apple wants authors and publishers to use those features, because those features are what differentiates iBooks on the iPad from all other e-readers. Bott’s on firmer gro...