on 2012-01-24 14:33 P. J. Alling wrote
Apple doesn't do any individual work on your project.
i don't think that matters; the work Apple does is to create a process which is an alternative to traditional publishers, and the user must decide if the tradeoffs are worth it; if not, skip it — there are plenty of other options — but i predict there will be some very successful authors who may not have done so well with a traditional publisher
Apple has almost none of the costs associated with publishing, and reaps more of the profits.
i don't see how that would be so; do you have any idea how little most authors make with traditional publishers? they are lucky to get 15% of the sales, and there are all kinds of "ifs & whens"; if they play it well with Apple's system, they'll get 70%, and Apple may be able to give them a bigger market than other self-publishing venues
i'm a little cautious about it myself, but the theory is that the iBooks ecosystem will work as well as the App Store has for small app makers (some of whose products are actually more like interactive books); for example the maker of Camera+, a simple camera app, has _netted_ over $5 million in about a year and a half; without the help of the App Store what do you suppose this small company would have earned? and assuming their sales would have been anywhere near as high, how much more would it have cost to manage all parts of the sales process for 6 million units?
A good publisher will supply an editor, (human, not software), to shepherd your project to completion.in a form suitable to be published.
absolutely true, that's a major difference; and publishers may also decide your book is not worth publishing; editors need not be employed by a publisher to do good work, however, and i can foresee a good market for the services of freelance editors and iBooks packagers; even though Apple has big publishers on board, they are probably quite afraid that their control over the industry will slip; my guess is they realized it will slip whether or not they work with Apple
So without help you put your blood sweat and tears into producing a work, which Apple's representatives decide for some reason cannot be sold through their store.So now you've got no ability to try to sell it on your own?
for most books, the real work is in authorship; the only thing you can't sell on your own is the widgety stuff, and you can make those other ways if you want to; so write the book, wrap it in iBooks format, and if Apple declines to sell it, you haven't given up the copyright on the text, so package it some other way (even the widgety stuff can be done without Apple's tools, but perhaps it will be more work)
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