I mentioned this because I recently bought an eBook on a photography technique
I'm interested in. It wasn't clear that it was an iBook format only for iPad.
I asked the writer if he had a different format, but he told me he isn't allowed to sell it
other than through the Apple site because it was made with the Apple App. He was more pissed
off about it than I was.
It's a funky situation when creative material can't be sold freely due to it being authored on a particular application.
Not a good precedence for either photographers or writers.
Not a negative jab at David Grover or Phase One at all.
Even blogger John Gruber, who tends to sympathize with Apple's side of the argument when controversies arise, objected. "This is Apple at its worst," he wrote. "Let's hope this is just the work of an overzealous lawyer, and not their actual intention."
Why the outcry?
"Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software's output,"
Wineman wrote.
"It's akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents,
or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can't freely sell it to Getty.
As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented."
