Today, author Sharon Lee wrote on Facebook that Apple has rejected some of the ebooks that she and her husband Steve Miller publish through their small press, Pinbeam Books. These books, Lee writes, commit the cardinal sin of mentioning Amazon.com, which seems to be verboten for ebooks published via the Apple Books Store. She adds:
As Pinbeam Books refuses to buy into the fantasy that mentioning a competitor means that one automatically loses sales to said competitor, we will not be “correcting” these titles, or any future titles that Apple, in its megalomania, may find offensive to it.
Pinbeam Books apologizes for the inconvenience, and suggests that there are other perfectly good retail outlets where their ebooks may be purchased.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because this isn’t the first time this has happened. Back in 2012, I reported that Holly Lisle had materials for a writing course she was putting together rejected for similar reasons, though those materials initially included active links to Amazon content. However, Lee and Miller’s works never had any such active links.
In fact, checking one of the titles in question, Halfling Moon, the only mention I see of Amazon at all is from the about-the-authors section at the end, which states that one of their books “hit Amazon.com genre bestseller lists.” This does seem like a trivial reason to reject a listing, which leads me to suspect an automatic algorithm somewhere was to blame rather than an actual live person. I can certainly sympathize with Lee and Miller’s decision to forego Apple rather than modify the book to meet Apple’s requirements—especially since Sharon Lee notes in a comment that 85% of their sales revenue comes through Amazon, Baen is their next biggest source, and “We earn nickels if that from Apple.”
A few days after the Holly Lisle story broke in 2012, Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader reported that Apple subsequently backed down where that one particular ebook was concerned, perhaps stung by all the negative publicity surrounding it. But Apple didn’t change its policies overall, and had been rejecting ebooks mentioning “Amazon” or “Kindle” for quite some time even then. Clearly, it’s still doing it now.
Apple has long played by its own rules when it comes to how it does ebooks. It only offers them via its own devices, and it insists on a 30% cut of any revenue from in-app purchases made on its platforms—which means Apple is the only one who can afford to sell ebooks directly in its own iOS e-reader app. This insistence that competitors not even be mentioned seems right in line with these other restrictions—and it’s also not exactly surprising for a company that would only enter the ebook market in the first place if it could nobble the competition with agency pricing beforehand.
But then, it’s not as if Apple is even particularly relevant to ebooks anymore. Some of the fans commenting on Sharon Lee’s post were surprised the company even does them at all. That’s quite a comedown for the iBooks program that was originally touted as Steve Jobs’s “Kindle killer.”
teleread.org 
Quote: This [mention of Amazon] does seem like a trivial reason to reject a listing, which leads me to suspect an automatic algorithm somewhere was to blame rather than an actual live person.
Nothing special in that. The high-tech companies hate to pay employees. They’d rather have computers do things. I seem to recall Amazon, years ago, making a similarly automated rejection of some competitor’s name that was so crudely done the mention wasn’t even about that competitor.
This is the sort of nonsense you get when companies move into a field without understanding its particular ethos, meaning ways of looking at the world. Barnes & Noble knows that ethos. It publishes their own titles, but it also understands the publishing ethos means it should not to get all hot and bothered when someone else’s books include a promotion of them as a publisher. It understands the line between a publisher and a retailer. The publisher controls the content. The retailer just sells.
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Neither Amazon nor Apple understand that ethos. They want to play the game in such a way that they ‘have their cake and eat it too.’ Both want to be able to demand the removal of content they dislike, including any mention of competitors. Sorry, but that’s the right of publishers (i.e. editors) but not retailers. On the other hand, they don’t want to be sued for content that might be libelous, something that does happen to publishers but not retailers.
You see the same ‘have and don’t have’ mindset with other tech companies such as Facebook. Facebook clearly wants to kick off those who politics it doesn’t like and to do so even though those people are doing nothing remotely illegal. It also wants to keep others who’re on far more doubtful ground because it likes their politics. And yet at the same time Facebook doesn’t want to face quite legitimate lawsuits for what some users say. Legally, you can’t pick and choose. If you take on the role of authorizing participants, tossing out some, then you must also take responsibility for those you implicitly authorize by not expelling.
Incidentally, that’s why Facebook and their kin want the government to take over the role of deciding who can post to Facebook and who cannot. They want the results without the consequences. They fail to grasp that ‘the government decides’ is the very essence of censorship.
In Anglo-American law we fought a long battle to end the requirement that the king had a right to authorize publishers or not. And unfortunately that’s a right that’s being constantly nibbled away in countries like the UK, which lack a written First Amendment. In the UK you can say also sorts of nasty things about Baptists, Catholics and Jews, but if you merely quote the Koran and stress its clear meaning, the police make come a knocking. Here’s an example.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/08/uk-police-warn-man-to-stop-criticizing-islam-on-facebook
Search for “UK policing criticism of Islam” for numerous other examples. You see the same cowering mindset in a host of other areas. High-tech companies really are cowards. The Clock app on iPhones places Gaza, a brutally repressive, terrorist state, in the “Palestinian Territories” but refuses to place majority Jerusalem in democratic Israel. It also lists cities in occupied Tibet as being in China but refuses to place Taipei, the capital of free and democratic Taiwan in Taiwan. Spineless, gutless cowards. And yeah, it is all about the money.
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When I was about twelve, I had the first hint of my political leanings while reading Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. I got ticked off that Asimov seemed to assume that ordinary people had no business running a society, that a shadowy ‘scientific’ elite could do better. A lot of high-tech executives apparently think like Asimov. They prefer for societies to be run by a select few. That’s why they want online posting, whether in China or the U.S. to be dictated by the government.
And linking back to this incident, it’s why Amazon and Apple want to tell authors what they are or are not permitted to say in their books. They think they know better. It’s that Asimov fallicy again.
That I loathe in all its manifestations. Like Thomas Jefferson, I believe that, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
–Michael W. Perry, editor of Dachau Liberated
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Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog.
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Reblogged this on Plaisted Publishing House and commented:
I’ve also seen this…It is a pain.
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I’m pretty much Appled-up, and I’m a compulsive reader who owns more ebooks than he will ever read. I wonder why none of them were bought from Apple? I have to believe that they really don’t care about selling books. They just want to do just enough to take the easy pickings.
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Hear. Hear. I still can’t fathom why line spacing isn’t adjustable in the iBooks app. If they can’t even do that how little do they care about books?
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“Apple has long played by its own rules when it comes to how it does ebooks. It only offers them via its own devices, and it insists on a 30% cut of any revenue from in-app purchases made on its platforms—which means Apple is the only one who can afford to sell ebooks directly in its own iOS e-reader app.”
Amazon books are only available on Kindles. Barnes & Noble doesn’t sell to Kobos. I see this as a non-issue for which only Apple gets criticized. As for the 30%, Amazon takes a 30% cut on all books over $2.99, and a 70% cut on anything sold for less. Where is the outcry? Apple allows all eReader companies to have apps on their platform. Apple doesn’t stop them from selling ebooks through the Safari iOS browser. They just want 30% if apps use Apple’s servers for the transaction. I think 30% is a bit steep, but it’s their playground. There aren’t even B&N, Kobo apps, etc. on the Kindle Fire, but Apple has apps for them all, so it seems that Apple is doing something good here.
We’ll have to see how the Supreme Court rules on their monopoly over their own device and ecosystem.
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