Apple lays off employees working on Books and News

[Cactus Chef]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024...ooks-and-news/

A shame. I imagine it probably doesn't impact too many people on MobileRead with all our dedicate e-readers, but I know a number of people whose primary reader is their iPad. It would be a bummer if Apple Books fell by the wayside.

[Deskisamess]

The Apple Books app is terrible. I only use it when I'm forced to.

We use Apple News, but there is so much about I dislike. I love having access to all the magazines, but reading news stories is frustrating. We pay extra for News, but are still subjected to multiple ads per story, some of which are auto-playing video ads.

And it is extremely left-leaning.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024...ooks-and-news/

A shame. I imagine it probably doesn't impact too many people on MobileRead with all our dedicate e-readers, but I know a number of people whose primary reader is their iPad. It would be a bummer if Apple Books fell by the wayside.

I appreciated that the story pointed out likely reasons:

The current set of cuts chiefly affects the Books team. Digital services like this have been a big part of Apple's financial success in recent quarters; in just the past year, services revenue is up 14 percent. However, Books has no subscription offering, and Apple was subject to a US Department of Justice price-fixing lawsuit.

[tomsem]

Oh come on. The price-fixing thing is very old news, it should not be cited as a reason for cutbacks now.

Clearly services revenue growth is tied to subscriptions, not book sales, but again that does not explain cutbacks now.

Book sales are not reported/broken out, so my working assumption is that they are flat, and perhaps outstrip expectations that may have been set awhile ago (during expansive COVID period when they were madly hiring people). Apple barely promotes Books at all.

Apple Books app is virtually the only reading app that has full Accessibility support. Kindle does pretty well, but fails to highlight text as it is read out (yes they updated to add 'assistive reading' that does this, AKA TTS, but it does not work smoothly - Speak Screen still works better last time I checked).

Even apart from that, where it shines, I do not agree that it is 'terrible'. I don't read many books with it but have no need to do so (given I don't purchase from Apple). It is nothing special but I prefer it to (say) Kobo, Nook, Play Books. It's very easy to import 3rd party content that syncs across Apple devices. But I guess we will never see Books on the web.

[JSWolf]

I'd be very happy to see Books go. I'd also be very happy for apple to drop eBooks.

It's Apple's fault that eBooks are more expensive then they used to be.

[Frogm4n]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Oh come on. The price-fixing thing is very old news, it should not be cited as a reason for cutbacks now.

The case in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...._Apple_(2012)

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'd be very happy to see Books go. I'd also be very happy for apple to drop eBooks.

It's Apple's fault that eBooks are more expensive then they used to be.

It's not that simple. Amazon only discounted a small percentage (basically NYT bestsellers). Everything else was set by publisher. And long before the bogus price-fixing lawsuit was successful, Amazon signed contracts that let publishers set the prices. In the end, even Amazon couldn't force them to agree to any other terms, and that's pretty much the same terms as for any digital media purchase.

Nobody is forced to pay $20 (or more) for a new release. I certainly don't. My average purchase is about $3.50. That's a lot less than I was paying for print books, even used ones.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by tomsem

It's not that simple. Amazon only discounted a small percentage (basically NYT bestsellers). Everything else was set by publisher. And long before the bogus price-fixing lawsuit was successful, Amazon signed contracts that let publishers set the prices. In the end, even Amazon couldn't force them to agree to any other terms, and that's pretty much the same terms as for any digital media purchase.

Nobody is forced to pay $20 (or more) for a new release. I certainly don't. My average purchase is about $3.50. That's a lot less than I was paying for print books, even used ones.

I wasn't meaning Amazon. We had other stores that did some discounting that are now gone because of Apple.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I wasn't meaning Amazon. We had other stores that did some discounting that are now gone because of Apple.

It's the publisher contracts, not Apple. Publishers won't work with retailers that won't let publisher set prices.

Apple wanted to have fixed set of prices like they did for MP3's. $12.99, $9.99 etc. when they launched iBooks for iPad. $12.99 was still a lot less than new release pricing for hardbacks at that time. They didn't really know what they were doing (and still don't, when it comes to ebooks). Publishers went along with it at first, they didn't know what they were doing either, but were hoping for some competition with Amazon and ebooks were still kinda a new thing.

It wasn't long before they decided that neither model suited them and that they didn't want any constraints on pricing.

[John F]

Originally Posted by tomsem

It's the publisher contracts, not Apple. Publishers won't work with retailers that won't let publisher set prices.

Apple wanted to have fixed set of prices like they did for MP3's. $12.99, $9.99 etc. when they launched iBooks for iPad. $12.99 was still a lot less than new release pricing for hardbacks at that time. They didn't really know what they were doing (and still don't, when it comes to ebooks). Publishers went along with it at first, they didn't know what they were doing either, but were hoping for some competition with Amazon and ebooks were still kinda a new thing.

It wasn't long before they decided that neither model suited them and that they didn't want any constraints on pricing.

I think the U.S. justice system disagrees with you. They were found guilty of engaging in a conspiracy that violated federal antitrust laws? I think the DOJ thinks Apple did more then just "want"".

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by John F

I think the U.S. justice system disagrees with you. They were found guilty of engaging in a conspiracy that violated federal antitrust laws? I think the DOJ thinks Apple did more then just "want"".

Yeah that too. Both things are true. But DOJ should not have bothered, the market took care of it. But like the other parties, they didn't know what they were doing either.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Yeah that too. Both things are true. But DOJ should not have bothered, the market took care of it. But like the other parties, they didn't know what they were doing either.

So, the Justice Department should not prosecute those who break the law because "the market will take care of them"?????
Apache

[John F]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Yeah that too. Both things are true. But DOJ should not have bothered, the market took care of it. But like the other parties, they didn't know what they were doing either.

Maybe? Did the collusion force ebook stores that discounted to close? Is that "what the market took care of"?

For example, looks at the timelines of fictionwise and the Apple/publishers collusion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictionwise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...v._Apple_(2012)

... Amazon learned about the coming deals between the publishers and Apple on January 18, 2010. ... The Big Six publishers called each other over 100 times in the week before signing the agreement. Steve Jobs even emailed James Murdoch, HarperCollins' parent company News Corp's CEO, to persuade him to have HarperCollins join. ...

... In March 2010, Fictionwise discontinued its "Buywise Club" which, in exchange for a membership fee, had offered discounted pricing for all their ebooks ...

[DrNefario]

I use the Books app a lot, for PDFs. It's my primary means of reading PDFs, and probably one of the main uses of my iPad at the moment.

I guess I don't mind that it also handles epubs, but I'm not at all interested in buying books from Apple. They are the only vendor whose books I can read on no other hardware (as far as I'm aware).

I have never knowingly opened the News app.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by tomsem

It's the publisher contracts, not Apple. Publishers won't work with retailers that won't let publisher set prices.

Apple wanted to have fixed set of prices like they did for MP3's. $12.99, $9.99 etc. when they launched iBooks for iPad. $12.99 was still a lot less than new release pricing for hardbacks at that time. They didn't really know what they were doing (and still don't, when it comes to ebooks). Publishers went along with it at first, they didn't know what they were doing either, but were hoping for some competition with Amazon and ebooks were still kinda a new thing.

It wasn't long before they decided that neither model suited them and that they didn't want any constraints on pricing.

Until Apple got involved in eBooks, prices were not fixed. Stores were able to have sales and discounts. Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard were two popular stores that sold eBooks. They did a really good business because they wrre able to offer discounts, sales, and other things such as Fictionwiae's Buywise club.

When Apple got involved, they wanted to take down Amazon and got the major publishers involved. Apple thought that if prices remained the same with no discounts or sales by the stores that we would not care where we purchased eBook and leave Amazon.

All that ended up doing was taking down the online stores who's business relied on sales and discounts.

As it is, prices on eBooks went up and have stayed up. Prices are near the same price for the pBook and sometimes more expensive. Sometimes when the pBooks comes out in paperback after the hardcover, the price of the eBook does not go down like it should.

If Apple had not rallied the publishers to try to screw over Amazon, eBooks would be cheaper and we'd have more stores to choose where we buy from.