Stargazer2006 said:
overscan said:
Personally, not until Apple have a software reader for non-Apple platforms. Which they will never provide, as they are a bunch of monopolistic, anti-competitive bastards who get away with behaviour that would see Google or Microsoft hauled up before the courts.
So true. How ironical that Apple has now developed a whole gang of proprietary software to be used only on proprietary hardware, considering how Microsoft was under attack a decade ago for being monopolistic...
The Microsoft anti trust case centered around Microsoft leveraging their position in operating systems to prevent competition in (specifically) web browsers. By making Internet Explorer a non-removable part of the operating system they were artificially creating a high barrier to entry to any third party browser (Netscape, etc.).
At the time, Microsoft was doing FAR worse things with their OEMs. The MS license agreements with some of these OEMs (companies that built or sold PCs with Microsoft operating systems preinstalled, etc.) made it pretty much impossible to offer other operating systems as a choice.
http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1298667420478086
Creating proprietary systems is not itself a violation of US anti trust law. In fact, it's encouraged - innovative systems are often by their nature proprietary, to protect those innovations. There are US laws that are designed to protect innovation, to foster its growth in the marketplace. What is against US law is using your position in one market to artificially destroy competition in another (what Microsoft was accused of).
Right now Apple is a minor player in the desktop, laptop, and even mobile markets. If you look at the % market share (by handsets) of iPhone models vs. Android, it's not very impressive. Android, though, is not single entity - it's a number of different manufacturers, different OS versions, etc. In that context, Apple is one of the larger handset manufacturers for "smartphones". Essentially the same holds true for the desktop. MacOS marketshare is still very low compared to other operating systems. But since Apple makes the hardware, they're actually one of the larger desktop manufacturers.
Because of that, it's hard to say that Apple acts as a monopoly. They don't have a dominant market position to abuse, at least not in business terms. But they are VERY influential. The back and forth in this thread is evidence enough of that!
In the case of digital books, authors and publishers are free to choose what they publish, how they publish it, and what prices to charge. I've looked at the economics of publishing digital books from several angles, and for the things I want to do, iBooks makes the most sense in terms of both features and money. The money gets a little more complicated because of the ISBN requirements, but I can deal with that easily enough. I very much wanted to make things available through the Kindle store as well, but for various reasons that does not look like it will happen. I am taking advantage of some of the advanced functionality that is available in iBooks but not in other formats (yet). When some of those capabilities are available, I can look at publishing to other formats. A PDF version that does not have some of those features (which, frankly, will kind of suck), is a possibility. For the things I am doing, digital publishing at all didn't make much sense until these features were available. That's certainly not the case for everyone.
Not everyone needs a 3D, anaglyph stereo interactive walkthrough of the YF-23 inlet; or a almost-live satellite view of a remote location. But to tell a certain story, it does help.