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]

[QUOTE=tomsem;4449481]Oh come on. The price-fixing thing is very old news, it should not be cited as a reason for cutbacks now./QUOTE]

The case in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...v._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.