Tell them, my song.

Everybody who’s read the fine print accompanying Apple’s new iBooks Author applications knows immediately that this application is only useful for Apple, but not for their customers. Titles created with the application are only allowed to be published EXCLUSIVELY in Apple’s iBooks store. And even if Apple refuses to publish your product, you are NOT allowed to publish it anywhere else.

But even if you are willing to sell your soul to Apple by agreeing with these terms, you only target one platform: The iPad. Yes, the iPad is successful. In the United States, at least, where people are obviously willing to spend a lot of their money on, let’s face it, digital toys with little real world use. And in my book, the iPad is one of those rather useless digital toys. But I’ve written about that before, so I won’t repeat it here again.

The problem for a content creator here is an awfully simple one – by using iBooks Author, you limit yourself to a rather small fraction of the entire market for eBooks. The last time I looked, Amazon’s Kindle platform (yes, platform, not just an eBook reader gadget) was the king of the hill. And the Kindle reader app runs anywhere – from the web over the Kindle hardware to PCs, Macs, Android and iOS gadgets. Kindle is ubiquitous. So are the ePub, mobi, PDF and even HTML5 formats. Anything anywhere can read them. This is where you have to go as a content creator.

Locking yourself into just one platform is not the way to go, to say it in harmless words. Its plain and simple stupid, to put it more bluntly.

To quote Steve Jobs himself: “If you give away your software for free and people still don’t want to use it, then you have a problem.”

Apple, you have a problem.

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.

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.

From the iBooks Author EULA.

UPDATE: Apparently, after all the flak they’ve taken for these EULA terms, Apple have decided to change the wording in order to “clarify” what they meant. The modified wording in the new EULA only ties the authors to Apple when they distributed certain iBooks libraries with their work, but Apple no longer claims exclusivity when the same work is distributed without the iBooks libraries elsewhere. I think that makes the EULA terms tolerable again, although iBooks Author probably only is a useful tool when you make use of those iBooks libraries. In other words, if you don’t want to lock yourself into the Apple ecosystem, either you have to live with a castrated version of iBooks Author or you have to use something else.

I posted this as a response to a blog entry of Mark Fleury:

I’m a content creator myself (fictional and non-fictional writing, music, software) and I know how it feels when the software company that you work for goes bankrupt and you have to live off your credit for a couple of months. It happened to me back in 2001, and at the same time you could download our product from the eDonkey network.

That being said, even as what you could call a victim and certainly an interested party, I do NOT support Internet censorship and so-called anti-piracy laws in the least. Down- and uploading copyrighted material has always been illegal and I do not see how making it “more” illegal is going to help anyone.

It’s similar to all those ridiculous anti-terrorism laws that did nothing to stop terrorism but managed to make travel via flight a horrible experience for everyone.

Also, I cannot blame the people who download songs and movies from the Internet. The same stuff that they download there is going to be broadcasted by TV and radio sooner or later, and when they record it from those sources, that’s not a problem for anybody anywhere in the world. Now please explain to a non-technical person why downloading a song from the Internet is a problem while recording the same song from radio is not. You won’t come up with anything that can convince a normal person. By the way, Michael Moore used exactly the same argument in an interview to underline that he doesn’t have a problem with people “pirating” his films.

Also, it is extraordinarily stupid from the industry to criminalize their own customers. The stupidest thing that they did was spending money on all those “anti-piracy” spots that you cannot even skip when you put a bought DVD in your player. The target audience of these spots – the pirates – do not even get to see those clips because whoever rips the DVD and distributes the rip will make sure that that annoying crap is not in the rip. So ultimately, only the paying customer is being punished. And after the second or third time that I had to sit through such a punishment I thought that I could have gotten the same quality without the annoyance for free had I only downloaded the movie from the Internet. That was a useful lesson to learn, but strangely, I doubt that it was the lesson that the MPAA wanted to teach me.

I don’t know what all the others out there want, I can only define my own wishlist for the movie industry. People will always pirate content, that CANNOT be prevented and it’s plain and simple stupid to even think that it could be done. Instead of wasting energy on finding complex ways to prevent this, the industry should come up with ways how to REWARD people who actually WANT to buy their stuff.

The old business models no longer work in a networked world where consumers no longer need a physical medium. And in a time where people have TVs in their homes with 50″ and above screens and surround sound systems, they also no longer need or want to go to a movie theater. That party is OVER. Technology made these parts of the industry OBSOLETE. There is only little use for faxes these days because people use email instead, but unlike the movie industry, Fax machine vendors did not try to make email illegal.

So why does the movie industry believe that their old distribution schemes are still supposed to work today?

What –I– want is simple: For example, when The Hobbit has left post-production, I want to use my PayPal account to download a DRM-free BluRay-quality rip of that movie for a REASONABLE, FAIR price. Not 20 Euros. That’s not reasonable. For a brand-new mainstream movie like this, I’d say that EUR 4,99 for DRM-free download is the maximum reasonable price. Older movies like, let’s say, Clint Eastwood’s Firefox should not cost more than EUR 1,99.

People will still pirate, even at that price. So in the end, maybe we should all simple pay a “culture flatrate” of 20 Euros or something per year and be allowed to download whatever content we want. There’s still merchandise that artists can make money with. And there still is the James Bond movie business model where a new James Bond movie usually already is in the win-zone before it even hits the movie theaters (obviously, there is a market for product placements).

Most of us live in democracies, and there is one principle that all democracies are supposed to follow: When a majority of people does it, it is legal. And one of the laws of nature is that you either evolve or extinct. Nobody can turn back the wheel of time. The content industry is now facing the choice of extinction or evolution. They are trying to build prisons for majority of people to help their own primitive interests. But it is in the nature of man to find a way out of the prison and to revolt against their tyrants.