Apple rejects e-books from App Store

Written on 8:23 PM by Mujtaba

Check the Apple App Store, and amongst the glut of legitimately useful games and applications, you will quickly find an infestation of lazily repackaged public domain e-books. They are aimed by less ethical entrepreneurs looking to bilk iPhone newbies into paying $1.99 for a copy of a book they could be reading on the Stanza e-book app for free.

There’s a certain degree of shadiness to this practice, but that’s not to say the App Store can’t be a verdant publication platform for independent authors interested in releasing their own novels to the public. Which is why Apple’s latest in a long line of despicable App Store policies is so depressing: Apple has begun rejecting all e-book submissions because “this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing upon third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store.”

That’s ostensibly a reasonable position, except Apple is rejecting e-books even when the rights to publish them are public domain, or can be explicitly proven to belong to the e-books submitter. Worse, they are rejecting applications that function as media browsing tools, i.e. e-book readers and the like.

What that means is that favored e-book apps in the Apple App Store may soon be a thing of the past. Say good bye to the glorious Stanza app, or even Amazon’s Kindle application.

Apple’s arbitrary App Store policies are getting out of hand. It’s time for a strong alternative to the App Store, and if Cydia or Icy can bake in a payment system, they might be able to show Apple how it should be done.

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