Nothing happens, under the dome. As civic life grinds to a halt, while we cower in our homes, we drift, hungry for direction.
I’ve come to a decision that’s been building for a while now – I’m going to pull my books from the Apple Books store. Or rather, I’m going to redevelop them in multiple formats, to be able to be sold directly, and viewed in user-selectable applications.
The why of this comes down to Apple having broken the functionality I rely upon for all the stuff I find interesting, with the transition from iBooks to Apple Books. With the things I want to do no longer doable, and the limitations of Apple Books being an Apple-device-only platform, there just isn’t any good reason for me to keep my books within an ecosystem that seems to be going nowhere good, or to keep making the investment in Apple’s book store, which takes 30% of the coverprice, and for which there’s no actual developer support available when you encounter what appears to be a problem with the app itself.
So, I’m going to go more independent. The plan is to go DRM-Free and sell through Fastspring, in multiple formats – the current fixed-layout EPUB, as well as CBZ and PDF.
I’ll lose some of the cool features I’d wanted, but given I’m losing them already, that’s already a conceded issue.