Amazon today released their new iPhone Kindle Store Application. The App seems to circumvent Apple’s 30% cut of the store proceeds by making the purchase through a Web browser interface and having the purchase be delivered on the backend directly to Amazon’s App. Will Apple let this stand? Will other large product and service distributors follow suit?
An interesting alternative for publishers and authors who want to be on the iPhone is the Iceberg Reader by Scrollmotion. This company takes a digital book and makes an application out of it. At the end of the process the publisher pays about the same amount to get a book on the App Store, but pays Scrollmotion and Apple instead of Amazon. Since each book is its own app, the authors have more flexibility in producing the book.app as well as in pricing and updating.
It will be interesting to see how Apple responds to the book apps situation. Steve Jobs famously said that people don’t read anymore, that’s why Apple won’t build an eBook reader.
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