Warning about Apples new iBooks Author program

Biggins

Its VERY important that writers read the EULA with their new iBooks Author program.

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or
service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.
And then the next paragraph is bold-faced, just so you don’t miss it:

Apple will not be responsible for any costs, expenses, damages, losses (including
without limitation lost business opportunities or lost profits) or other liabilities you may incur as a result of your use of this Apple Software, including without limitation the fact that your Work may not be selected for distribution by Apple.

Under this license agreement, you are out of luck. They won’t sell it, and you can’t legally sell it elsewhere. You can give it away, but you can’t sell it. Updated to add: By “it,” I am referring to the book, not the content. The program allows you to export your work as plain text, with all formatting stripped. So you do have the option to take the formatting work you did in iBooks Author, throw it away, and start over. That is a devastating potential limitation for an author/publisher. Outputting as PDF would preserve the formatting, but again the license would appear to prohibit you from selling that work, because it was generated by iBooks Author.

See further details here: http://lnw.me/AZ5NLO

If your like me and sometimes skip reading the full details of every bit of software EULA, you might be caught out!

Orion

That is outrageous. I'd never use any Apple product anyway but even by their standards that's disgraceful.

kickarykee

Apple used to be really good, but now it's all only about the money, anymore - really sad.

The Mad Hatter

Given that iBooks Author provides the tools for producing multimedia books (generally, textbooks with lots of pictures, videos, interactivity and slideshows) for sale in the iBookstore on iTunes, and the formatting it talks about is generally done automatically by the app, without much more than tweaking by the author, I doubt this will be of too much concern to too many authors. If you're looking for an app to write a typical book or novel in, iBooks Author is not for you anyway (and why not just use a word processor?).

I don't know if there is any other useful means that authors can use to produce multimedia books like this that's available yet, nor anywhere useful to view them than on an iPad, but there will be, and authors who wish to sell in multiple markets will be able to use those tools and devices.

It should also be borne in mind that, while a 30% cut might seem like a lot, it's pretty much the industry standard. It's the same cut that Amazon takes on ebooks sold in the Kindle store, and an awful lot less than the ~90% taken by most publishers.

kickarykee

That's true but if I read correctly it says that you have to first sign a contract that grants Apple exclusive publishing rights while it may just as well determine that it will actually never publish your book, meaning you will never get to see it published or earn anything from it.
That's something Kindle definitely will not do.