You can use iBooks Author to create app-books for the iPad with pictures, disability access, movies, etc (they're aiming mostly at textbooks, here). They're aiming to make the creation of "enhanced ebook" apps extremely easy, most likely in an attempt to combat amazon and the kindle brigade. You can sell the resultant app on the appstore, giving Apple it's customary cut of the profits, or you can give it away free. All good so far, and good news for authors looking for a new product line.

What people are crying about is the caveat: that you can't sell that app anywhere else but the iTunes store.

There seems to be a lot of ignorance flying around here, really. This sounds like a terrible precedent - a software EULA (that's the thing you click "I agree" to when you install some software) is controlling what people can and cannot do not only with the program itself, but with the output of what they create with it. Ohnoes! The world is doomed! No other software on the planet does this, this is like Microsoft Word telling you you can only sell your short stories to Microsoft!

Can you see my sarcasm? I certainly hope so.

It isn't a precedent at all. I can easily think of five pieces of software - creative software - sitting on my computer right now that forbid me from directly selling any output I can create. For example, a cartography program I have that forbids me from selling maps I create with it. They can be included in books or other works, but I can't sell just the maps themselves. Other software packages such as the Adobe Creative Suite have clauses that prevent you using them for commercial purposes if you only paid for the educational license. Icons and graphics I occasionally buy from places like iStockPhoto often come with licenses that allow me to do whatever I want with the image provided I don't sell anything that results from that. Simulation products (like a solar-system simulator) forbid me from using the resultant calculations or simulations or video for any commercial purposes.

This isn't anything new. And it isn't even anything particularly inconvenient: unless the iPad jailbroken, which isn't common, the only way you can put apps on an iPad is through the iTunes store. So you can't take the resultant app you've created and sell it in other places but there really isn't anywhere else you could sell it anyway. This software only creates apps that run on iPads. It can't create things to run on the Galaxy Tab, or the Motorolla Zoom, or the Kindle Fire. It can generate PDFs of the book, but they've never been the ebook format of choice anyway. So the rights they're "taking away" from you aren't really ones you could have exercised anyway, and if you really want to exercise them, all you need to do is this: use something else to create the ebook.

This isn't a rule that applies to all books sold through the iTunes store. It's a rule that applies specifically and only to books created using this free app. Don't like it? Make your app the old fashioned way, or hire someone to make it for you.

Then there's a lot of people gabbling about how this is a copyrights grab, which is nonsense - Apple is limiting the rights to the version of your content that you created with their product. The limitation is tied to the actual final product created with the software and nothing else. They have no claim whatsoever to the original content, and no argument if you create enhanced ebooks for android and kindle devices and sell those - you just can't use their software to do so (and the software isn't capable of that anyway). The claim ends with the actual final product - which is just like the publishing world anway. When the rights to a novel revert to an author, that author can't just order another print run using the publisher's typography, layout and cover - they have to get it typeset again, and get a new cover for it. They don't get the rights to the final product that their publisher made; only to the (edited, unless the contract is really miserly) content that was used to create it in the first place - the manuscript.

Then there's the argument that everything sold through the Apple store is vetted by apple - you may spend months creating something only to have it rejected by them, and then have no way to sell it. Well, pardon me, but if you're going to spend all that time working on it and not even investigate a way to create a similar product for the other markets (particularly when some of those markets are far larger and more successful selling this kind of product) then it's your own damn fault. Add to that that Apple doesn't typically reject things for no reason: they'll tell you why it didn't meet the standards, and you can resubmit. That process is pretty much there to keep out porn, malware and things that would undercut Apple's own products (and books are unlikely to fall under that category).

Really, this sounds like a lot of crying from people who don't spend all that much time with new software. I'm not even going to go into the complaint that it's in the EULA and not in a separate agreement. The EULA is where this kind of agreement should be. The End User License Agreement is there to stipulate, amongst other things, what you can and can't do with this software. If you don't agree after downloading the software, then don't install the damn thing. That goes for any new software you download. Complaining that you don't get to find out about this before you download it is just, well, naive. "You don't know about the agreement until after you've committed to the software" - it's a free app. That's really not much of a committment. Download more software and learn how that world works, because this isn't anything new.

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