Apple’s added the ‘Books’ category to the AppStore, and has moved the e-books released by AppEngines and others there. This is yet another quick response to user feedback, in line with the AppStore alphabetization tweaks - many thought the sheer number of e-books were spammy and complained.
The AppEngines e-books are nice - I’ve bought a couple, and even though it’s free, public-domain content, the work that’s gone into the application is worth the $0.99 to me. Personally see the AppStore e-books issue as a ‘business model failure’ on Apple’s part. Because it’s not possible to download the free application and then buy the content as you need it, companies like AppEngines have to release a new application for each book. This works for now, but I wonder if it scales. What happens when an e-book publisher partners with a real-world publisher, and ends up offering thousands of new titles - presumably for considerably more than $0.99?
Although I’m sure this isn’t an easy task, hopefully Apple will support additional revenue models in the future, including subscription-based models and paid downloadable content packs. (Some support for trial periods would be nice as well.) In the meantime, the creation of a ‘Books’ category is a good first step.
A bit of a housekeeping question: with the number of ‘Books’ in the AppStore undoubtedly about to increase, would you like to see them remain in Pinch Media’s RSS feeds or filtered out? AppEngines is providing us with an easy way to remove them, should the majority of readers want them gone.
7 Comments
Filter them out, but create a separate feed for Books, which would likely be useful to many people who aren’t interested in new/updated applications. I’m not going to be interested in new apps once I’ve found my favorites and settled my workflow, but I will probably continue to be interested in new books.
Though really, Apple needs to create a Books app that works just like music and movies in the iPod app.
I’d like to second what dance said.
I agree with the first comment.
Ditto to above.
Books have now been filtered out of the new apps feed and I just threw up a new feed just for eBooks. You can subscribe to it here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RecentlyAddedIphoneEbooks-PinchMedia
I suppose AppEngine’s individual apps for individual books is an OK solution. It seems kind of silly for PD books. Zachary Bedell’s Bookshelf app is closer to the right track when it comes to PD and CC books. The AppEngine style solution works better for non-PD and CC books since the App Store provides the DRM which many publishers will probably still insist on.
One problem is customers won’t be able to rely of a known feature set in the readers from different book app vendors and updating something like AppEngine’s reader with a new version becomes a daunting proposition with hundreds of titles and thus hundreds of apps to update.
Bookshelf
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284934036&mt=8
Richard - there’s no denying that the current mechanism for updating applications doesn’t scale well when you’ve got hundreds of nearly identical applications in the AppStore. But I’ve got to believe the capabilities of the platform will improve over time and we’ll see both more efficient updates and the ability for applications to charge for downloadable content. It’ll be interesting to see how things evolve over the next few months.
I’ve looked both at Bookshelf & AppEngine and they both definitely have their strong points.