Friday, August 12, 2011

Google Books Bows to Apple, New Kindle App Rocks!

Google Books Bows to Apple, New Kindle App Rocks!


PC World writes and we agree and add on: Google Books Bows to New Apple App Store Rules and Amazon Books proves HTML5 can be beautiful!


"The Google Books app allowed users to read books from Google's e-books service, as well as provide access to a Web-based version of the store. But under widely debated new Apple rules, companies like Google, Amazon or Kobo have to give Apple a 30 percent cut of their sales via iOS, by implementing Apple's in-app purchasing system, rather than keeping all proceeds to themselves with their own in-app sales systems. 


Amazon was one of the first major players to bow down to Apple's rules (and power, controlling 220 million iOS devices), and updated the Kindle iOS app and removed a button that linked to the Kindle Store on the Web. At the same time, Amazon made it more inconvenient for users of the app to buy content from its store (via Safari), but at least this way it is not sharing 30 percent of sales with Apple. Barnes & Noble's Nook app and Kobo's e-reader app have had similar changes made."


Amazon has an Ace in Their Pocket




Geek.com writes, Amazon unveils iPad-friendly Kindle Cloud Reader: "the Amazon Cloud Reader has finally been unveiled. Following in the musical footsteps of Amazon’s Cloud Player, the Reader allows browser-based perusing of all your Kindle purchases. Right now, however, only a pair of browsers are officially supported: Google Chrome and Safari. If you visit read.amazon.com with any other browser, you’ll be advised to download one of the others in order to use the service."



Their HTML5 based  Kindle Cloud Reader User Interface is beautiful. It is clean, simple to understand, clearly shows what you have on the Cloud and what is on your device. I've opened content on four different devices - Android tablet, laptop and two different desktops) and was able to resume reading on the same page. (History major, joygasm!)






I suspect Google will not be far behind with an HTML5 solution for Google Books. 


Which begs the question: will application providers that reach a certain size (revenue level) bail out of the Apple store by deploying HTML5? Why cut Apple in for 30%? Small developers may still want the distribution support, but the closed Apple environment may be reduced to a proof of concept or a test bed until an App bootstraps into profitability. And, now Geek.com is reporting that Apple is urging some app developers to increase their prices. 


At what size will an App abandon the iStore like Amazon and Vudu?


Xolo