Let’s say you write a best-selling book, of which you sell 100,000 copies from your own website for $10 each. A million bucks in revenue.

Under Apple’s license, all of those copies are in violation of the license agreement. You owe them $300,000 in commissions plus whatever damages they can extract from you.

If you wrote that book using Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition, you owe Microsoft the difference between the $129 you paid for the “private, noncommercial” software and the $299 commercial version. That’s $170.

Huh – how do you compare these two scenarios?  Aren’t they completely different? iBooks Author is a free software meant for creating enhanced ebooks, to be sold through the iTunes Store. Microsoft Office is a general purpose suite (I am assuming here that the reference here is to the word-processing application – MS Word). I fail to see how the two compare. If you create a book using Pages, for example, you can create it by spending only 20 bucks, as opposed to 129 bucks (greedy, anyone?) and NO, Apple will not come at you for any cut of any revenue you make using this tool.

Here’s the thing – you can even create a book in Pages, send it to a publisher and sell your million copies, and then drop it into iBooks Author, create a version for the iTunes Store and sell another 10 million. Of course on the revenue you make through iTunes, you give a 30% cut to Apple. Apple does not want any cut from the revenue you made (or continue to make) for content created outside of iBooks Author.

iBooks Author is a special tool built and given away by Apple so publishers and content creators can create the next generation of textbooks, or books in general. This in no way precludes anyone from creating and selling their content elsewhere, if created outside this one tool. By the way, neither is Apple saying that you need to create only in iBooks Author if you want to sell in the iTunes Store – you can very well generate a standard ePub using a free tool like Calibre. And you can then sell it on the Amazon store, your own personal site, wherever you want. I really think that Ed Bott is upset that Apple has put out the best tool for this kind of stuff and the results (check out the free textbook examples on the iTunes Store) are nothing short of amazing.

As someone said in one of the comments to Ed Bott’s post:

Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

Get it, Mr. Bott?

…of course the tech press is agog at the latest evolutionary product from Apple that looks identical to its predecessor, and I’m sure in some sad neighborhood somewhere, the usual group of lemmings is queuing up at a store to be the first to own a device that will be obsolete in 12 months.

Hah! Refer the title of this post. And I am sure that he did not see this slide from the iPad launch…

Apple’s biggest announcement last Wednesday wasn’t the new iPad or Apple TV, GarageBand or iPhoto. For business professionals, the big announcement was the price drop of the iPad 2. Apple dropped the price of the iPad 2 $100, to start at $399. That’s cheap.

Further…

The price cut also puts downward pressure on the original iPad. Again, this is just anecdotal, but an early Apple adopter in the office who already bought the new iPad offered me his original (also purchased on day one) iPad for $200. That’s the cost of a Nook.

And short of the dedicated literary consumer, I think the original iPad (which still has  a year or so of life and updates left in it) is a worthy contender to the Nook. For one, it is tied to the vastly expanding iTunes content ecosystem, which now includes textbooks. Whatever its shortcomings, it is a darn sight lighter and more portable than a bag full of text books. And it also does web browsing, and email, and plays your iTunes music.

Magical.

Amol & Mihir wandering off into the woods

Was reminiscing about our stay in Black Forest, Germany. Can’t beat the beauty of the woods, mountain roads, small trails that lead off into the forest, the cuckoo clocks everywhere and the absolutely fantastic, bracing summer weather. We spent a glorious two days there, and would dearly love to do it again. One of the best parts of the stay was our B&B – you will not believe the quality of the place. At one of our next stops, we stayed at the Novotel in Colmar and this B&B just blew the Novotel away. Lesson learnt – when traveling in Western Europe, just go with the traditional accommodation. The location was also perfect, right next to a babbling brook (a small stream actually), right next to a large house-sized cuckoo clock (operated by 1 Euro).  Brilliant, refreshing and absolutely high on repeat value.

Some images of the trip: the full album is here.

View from our balcony

A typical trail in Schwarzwald

The Gastehaus Ursula

You’re either buying into a platform or you’re buying gadgets. The fundamental disconnect between the apprently solid Android engineering that’s happening at Google and the actual packaging and deployment that’s happening to end-users is turning into a real problem. To my mind, it’s a dealbreaker for schools or anyone thinking beyond their next carrier subsidy.

Entirely agree. Android junkies still drool over the quad-core processor, the amount of RAM, etc.

Its the experience, folks.

Evidently WARM tablets can’t join a Windows domain, which has major implications for a Microsoft proposition that its tablets are better suited for the enterprise than the iPad. This is probably just a schedule casualty in the enormous effort required to port to a new processor architecture (ARM support is almost certainly the long pole for Windows 8), but it could also be a convoluted attempt to advantage notebook PCs or, even more implausibly, represent a bold endorsement of Intel’s power consumption roadmap.

It means Windows 8 ARM tablets are going to be consumer devices that don’t integrate with the Microsoft enterprise infrastructure any better than the iPad, so Microsoft loses what should have been a major selling point. You will have to sacrifice battery life and go with x86 to get enterprise features and manageability. This is a big blow to Microsoft’s tablet proposition for the enterprise and WOA may be DOA as a result.  It will be fascinating to understand the decision-making behind this result.

The reasoning seems to be simple to me: It takes much more than bluff and bluster to make a really compelling tablet. Windows on ARM looked to the industry a compelling indictment of Intel’s achievements in the low-power CPU market. And the big beef was supposed to be the manageability advantage of Windows tablets. Good luck with that!

The reality: almost 3 years after Apple snookered the tech world and created a new product category from scratch (again!), some credible alternatives are just emerging. And no, none of them are Windoze tablets.

The gap between Apple and other tech firms is now likely to narrow. This week’s announcement of a new iPhone by a management team led by Tim Cook, who replaced Mr Jobs as chief executive in August, was generally regarded as competent but uninspiring. Without Mr Jobs to sprinkle his star dust on the event, it felt like just another product launch from just another technology firm.

Hmmm

The iPhone, iPod and iPad are so intuitive, children as young as one or two use them easily, swiping to unlock, tapping open their favorite app, and playing a game or their favorite song. The user interface and experience is just straightforward.

In Tolkien’s world, wizards are wise, powerful, and farseeing. They are subtle and quick to anger, attentive to the smallest of details, and capable of seeing greatness in the humblest of hobbits. They are fallible, but also fearless—even when confronted with seemingly certain defeat. There are very few people in the age of man that deserve to be called wizards, but Steve Jobs is one of them

The formula is simple: take a bunch of neat technology that has never lived up to its promise, rethink what it’s for, do some secretive hard work, and then release a natural, retrospectively obvious experience that redefines what computers can do.

It really is that simple.