Apple and Indie Publishers

Today the Wall Street Journal did a piece about how the government has been screwing with Apple over the iBooks store. Even though I’m a lawyer, I’ve never practiced anti-trust law and I’m baffled by what is going on. However, I do have some observations from my vantage point as a publisher.

Apple Made it Possible for Me to Make Awesome Books

When I first started writing Paperless, the iBooks store did not exist. There were no snazzy tools for me to incorporate rich-media with text and I was facing up to the fact that I was going to have to Frankenstein ePub and PDF to get what a wanted, a book that not only told you how but also showed you how. I spent weeks researching and testing and still didn’t have it nailed down. Then Apple announced iBooks Author and the iBooks store and I immediately abandoned all prior efforts and jumped to the new platform. iBooks Author gives me exactly what I need to publish the books I want to make. 

Apple Treats Indie Authors With Respect

Apple didn’t only give me the authoring tools, they also provided me the ability to distribute the books. Getting hooked into the iBooks store system was not an insurmountable task, even for a small indie publisher like me. I’ve sold a lot more books through the iBooks store than I ever would have going it on my own. Moreover, Apple supports indie authors. Don’t believe me? Here is a screenshot from the iBooks Store home page taken earlier today.


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Amazon’s initial author royalty was just 35%. To make $7, I’d need to sell my books for $20. It wasn’t until Apple’s looming arrival that Amazon upped that to 70%, matching the App Store. Amazon’s 70% royalty, however, comes with a catch. Amazon also charges authors a “download fee”. The fee is currently $ 0.15 per MB. With my 1GB sized media-rich books, my download fee would be $150 per book.

That’s right. $150.

So to earn my $7, I would need to sell the book for $160 with $150 in delivery costs payable to Amazon and an additional $3 to Amazon for its cut of the royalty. Looking at this page, it looks as if Amazon has an option where they will waive the delivery cost if I agree to give them 65% of the sale. Both of these options are a raw deal for us authors.

Apple serves up my 1GB book and takes 30% of my sale. There is no wonky accounting and I get my $7 for every $10 book. Moreover, Apple earns that $3 by developing my publishing tool, keeping the lights on at the iBooks Store, and covering the cost of serving 1GB sized books to every customer.

How the United States Government can figure this is anti-competitive is still lost on me. Without Apple entering the market, I simply would not be able to publish the MacSparky Field Guides.

Drummer Boy

I’ve never liked the Drummer Boy Christmas carol. I remember playing it as a kid and thinking about how much it made me sleepy. Last year I decided to do my own cover of Drummer Boy so I cooked this up with Garage Band on the iPad and my MIDI keyboard. Enjoy.

Fiddling with Ulysses III


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I’ve been working on a bigger-than-usual writing project in Ulysses III the last few weeks and there is a lot to like about this app. It looks amazing. There clearly was a lot of thought put into design. It renders text beautifully and embraces plain text. Ulysses is, thankfully, not a Scrivener clone but something different. In my mind the simplicity and organizational tools make it great for projects of medium size and duration.

My biggest dissapointment is the iOS integration with Daedalus Touch. While it works, it doesn’t really feel right and Daedalus is such a different paradigm that it is off-putting for me. I’d really like to see the developer release an iPad version of Ulysses that brings a large part of the experience over with seemless iCloud syncing.

Moving into 2014, I know there is an iPad version of Scrivener in the works and I suspect there is a version of Ulysses for the iPad coming too. If those two apps ship, us iPad writers are going to have some really great options to choose from.

My Fancy-Pants Camera After a Year


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Shawn Blanc wrote about the nerd vision-quest he took that ended up in him buying a mirrorless Olympus E-PL5 camera last years. I followed this quite closely since I was also in the market. At the time I had one of the early Canon Digital Rebels that was still a fine camera but I found I rarely brought it with me on a whim. Sure I’d bring the big bag for planned family gatherings but never for a trip to Disneyland or just a walk through the local park. It wasn’t just the wieght around my neck that held me up but also the camera’s general “bigness”. The camera body plus my lens simply didn’t make it easy for me to jump on the teeter-totter or run after a frisbee. So instead I left it at home.

So when Shawn seized on the Olympus, so did I. I bought the PL5 shortly after he wrote about it (through Shawn’s affiliate link) about a year ago along with the Panasonic 1.7 20mm pancake lens. With the body and the lens, I was in for about $1,000. I’ve been using it for a year nearly exclusively with that lens and can report the camera was a great investment.  It fits in my pocket and takes some really great pictures. A year later you’d think that I’d be itching for a new lens but I’m not. The combination of the small body and pancake lens are perfect for me. (The Panasonic lens is even smaller than the stock lens pictured above.)

If you are looking for a new camera, take a look at Shawn’s update post, which I agree with on just about every point. If you are thinking about buying the Olympus, you are making a good choice. Just make sure to buy it through Shawn’s link since he is the one that started us all on this journey.

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Secure a Network for Some Turkey

If you are going to be on the road this Thanksgiving visiting your muggle relatives, that would be an excellent time to do them a favor and enable OpenDNS. It is ridiculously easy and I’d bet your hosts will be really thankful if you can ban porn from their homes, especially if there are kids. We talked about OpenDNS on the Mac Power Users ages ago but it is all still relevant. Also, my pal Katie Floyd made this handy screencast. 

TextExpander and iOS Data Sharing

From the first time TextExpander touch showed up it always seemed kind magical that data could get shared … on iOS. Over the years, Smile has always found a way to keep this working. This past week, Smile faced a new setback when Apple rejected a relatively minor update that has sent them back to the drawing board. I’m sure they’ll figure it out but in the meantime, I recommend opening the current version of TextExpander touch and downloading your snippet library before the current system changes. I suspect it will be awhile before everything sorts out and even longer before the app developers adopt the new sync method (whatever that ends up being).

I’m guessing the apps that haven’t updated will still be able to get at your existing snippets through the Reminders database (which is how TextExpander currently syncs your data). 

The bigger issue in all of this is the lack of options for iOS apps to share data. I understand how important security is but I also think the iOS experience is worse off without a way share data easier .Why can’t we take a PDF file and move it between separate applications instead of making a separate copy every time? Why can’t apps we trust, like TextExpander, get enough access to move some data between apps? Windows Phone and Android have already taken steps in this direction. I sure hope this is high on the list for iOS 8.