Apple's iBook Mafia Move

Apple’s ($AAPL) officially taken control of their own reading and book downloading universe with the type of strong-arm tactics that would’ve made a 1990’s-era Bill Gates grin with approval…

From TechCrunch:

At the beginning of the year, Apple said it wanted 30% of everything sold through the iPad platform. You could sell almost anything – books, downloadable content, magazines, pictures of kittens – but, according to their subscription rules, everything had to go through Apple itself and you could not, in short, go out to a web page to complete the transaction. That promise – to shut down external web stores on the iPad – has been fulfilled and the Nook, Kindle, Kobo, and Google Books apps have just been either drastically changed or removed from the App Store entirely.

You wanna read something on the iPad?  Apple gets its piece, period.  In the wars to come, this type of competitive ring-fencing will become a matter of survival.  Google and Amazon take note.

Source:

iPad Book Apps Hobbled: Only Existing Account-Holders Can Use The Apps, Google Books Booted (TechCrunch)