The Apple iBookstore is a really easy place to buy and sell books, and many authors want to get in on that, so it makes sense that some might look to an Apple product like iBooks Author to get them there. But before you do, you might want to take a careful read of the end user license.
At the time I’m writing this, their current agreement has language in it that could actually forbid you from selling any output you create with that software. Anywhere. It appears to force you to sell your resulting ebook only through Apple. And then it reminds you that Apple is in no way promising to accept your ebook for sale.
I don’t normally comment on the politics of writing tools, or on the Byzantine intellectual property arms race taking place in Big Media these days, but this is one maneuver in that war that could wind up taking out an entire village of defenseless novelists – if that read of the agreement is accurate and it remains unchanged.
For more detail, head on over to Ed Bott’s article at ZDNet, which is where I first got wind of it.
