<story><title>Apple responds: we want a cut of Amazon, Sony e-book sales</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/apple-responds-to-app-store-furor-says-it-wants-a-cut-of-e-book-sales.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>I think we were all afraid of some move like this. Nobody cares about Sony&apos;s ebooks. Everybody (me included) cares about Kindle.&lt;p&gt;I can sort of understand where Apple is coming from in this. They provide an ecosystem and apps live within their ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;That being said, I can&apos;t see Amazon or any other big player rolling over on a margin of 30%. This is the problem with one fixed margin: it works well for apps and music but not necessarily for other things.&lt;p&gt;You see the same problem with the Mac App Store: smaller devs love it. Will you see Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop on it? I doubt it. 30% is just too much for those big players to hand over.&lt;p&gt;I consider Kindle to be a key part of my iPad experience and I can say if the end result of this is that I can&apos;t read my Kindle books on my iPad I will be &lt;i&gt;pissed&lt;/i&gt;. I bought them specifically because I could.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately though I think Apple needs to give up control here. They should provide a payment infrastructure and if it&apos;s comeplling, people will use it. If it&apos;s not, they won&apos;t. But don&apos;t make me a casualty of war in the names of the the consistency of your 30% cut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaaron</author><text>30% can be the entire profit margin for electronic content.  The apps themselves are free and the provider has to pay a significant chunk back to the content owner (author, label, studio or publisher), leaving a much smaller margin for the retailer. 30% to Apple simply makes iOS unprofitable.&lt;p&gt;This also extends to subscription services. Do you expect Netflix or Hulu to hand over 30% of subscription revenue?  I don&apos;t think so.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple responds: we want a cut of Amazon, Sony e-book sales</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/apple-responds-to-app-store-furor-says-it-wants-a-cut-of-e-book-sales.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>I think we were all afraid of some move like this. Nobody cares about Sony&apos;s ebooks. Everybody (me included) cares about Kindle.&lt;p&gt;I can sort of understand where Apple is coming from in this. They provide an ecosystem and apps live within their ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;That being said, I can&apos;t see Amazon or any other big player rolling over on a margin of 30%. This is the problem with one fixed margin: it works well for apps and music but not necessarily for other things.&lt;p&gt;You see the same problem with the Mac App Store: smaller devs love it. Will you see Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop on it? I doubt it. 30% is just too much for those big players to hand over.&lt;p&gt;I consider Kindle to be a key part of my iPad experience and I can say if the end result of this is that I can&apos;t read my Kindle books on my iPad I will be &lt;i&gt;pissed&lt;/i&gt;. I bought them specifically because I could.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately though I think Apple needs to give up control here. They should provide a payment infrastructure and if it&apos;s comeplling, people will use it. If it&apos;s not, they won&apos;t. But don&apos;t make me a casualty of war in the names of the the consistency of your 30% cut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rbanffy</author><text>&amp;#62; Everybody (me included) care about Kindle.&lt;p&gt;I am very happy with my Nook and the no-DRM policies adopted by O&apos;Reilly, Manning Pragmatic and probably others. I am also delighted with the amount of interesting material freely available on Feedbooks (in Kindle-friendly format too)</text></comment>