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Apple's iBooks EULA Drawing Ire
An anonymous reader writes in with one of many articles about the iBooks EULA, this time questioning whether it is even enforceable. Quoting: "The iBooks Author EULA plainly tries to create an exclusive license for Apple to be the sole distributor of any worked created with it, but under the Copyright Act an exclusive license is a 'transfer of copyright ownership,' and under 17 U.S.C. 204 such a transfer 'is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed.' When authors rebel and take their work elsewhere, Apple has, at most, a claim for breach-of-EULA — but their damages are the failure to pay $0 for the program."
PDF is free and open now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf
Relevant snippet:
"While the PDF specification was available for free since at least 2001,[4] PDF was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe, and was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008.[1][5] In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting a royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations.[6]"
You're still missing the point.
If Apple doesn't publish you. GAME OVER. The only way to get your book out there after that is to give it away...for free!
Nonsense. You only can't publish the very file created by iBooks Author elsewhere. The content you wrote is still yours.
This is even spelled out in the EULA later on. Of course this is desperately ignored in that article and everywhere else.
Exactly. This entire post is based on a false premise that you are giving away your rights to your content by using their authoring tool when in fact the only limitation is that you cannot take content created in iBooks Author and sell it elsewhere using the iBooks format. If you want to sell it outside of the app store, create it in a different format.
This article is a lot of nothing..
Calibre is free and does exactly what you specify; I can write something in plaintext, in notepad, and have Calibre convert it into various formats for me, automatically on a per-device basis; so for device A I might have it auto-export as .epub, and for device B as .pdf and so on and so forth.