It looks like the long arm of Apple’s iTunes App Store policies is going to spare nobody. After recently denying Sony from bringing their app into the iTunes App Store because it didn’t have any in-app purchasing functions (due to a new policy – all iOS apps are required to have in-app purchases if additional content from the app can be purchased out of the app). This means that current eBook apps that have been happily content selling their eBooks on the iTunes App Store like Amazon’s Kindle and the like will have to make such a feature available in their app. However, the catch is that Apple’s in-app system has a restriction of being able to only sell 3,000 items – Amazon and Kobo each have around 2.5 million different books available. And unless Apple removes this restriction and increases the amount of items that their purchasing system can store, these major book stores will have no way of using iOS to sell their books through in-app purchases, thus putting them in violation of the App Store rules. When June comes around, these apps will not be able to comply with the rules and will be pulled out of the App Store, and opening up the field for Apple to come in with their own bookstore service. And Apple will obviously be able to bypass their own rules since it’s their app store after all. Sneaky? Definitely. Fair? Who’s to say. Let’s see how this situation gets resolved in the coming months.
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