Thursday, May 12, 2011

News: iFlow Reader Shuts Down, Blaming Apple's New Policy; Kobo eReader Price Drop

In advance of any official reckoning between Apple's reinterpreted rule requiring "that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase," the makers of the iFlow Reader app are angrily throwing in the towel. BeamItDown Software publisher Philip Huber announced that the company and its ereading app will cease operations on May 31.
They launched their ebookstore in December 2010 and say in a posted letter to customers that "two months later, Apple changed the rules and put us out of business. They now want 30 percent of the sale price of any books, which they know full well, is all of our profits and more. What sounds like a reasonable demand when packaged by Apple's extraordinary public relations department is essentially an eviction notice to all ebook sellers on iOS."

Other major ereading app providers we have heard from recently still do not know if and how Apple intends to enforce this rule on their apps in the near future.

Kobo dropped the price of its Wi-Fi reader from $139 to $99.99 as part of its "Spring Savings" promotion, with both Best Buy and Wal-Mart selling the device at the new price, the latter as part of a clearance sale.


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