IMHO, Apple is clearly doing this because they can't get a cut of the revenue generated by the sale of the book on Amazon.
Shallow thinking on their part as (a) they could route the links through their own affiliate account on Amazon, (b) they could cut a referrer deal with Amazon so that it appears to be a direct link, or (c) they could recommend alternative, competing books on iBookStore since they control the user experience.
I have personal experience that they are doing this same thing in iPhone apps, as they have declined an app of mine because there is a revenue model they can't tap into, and they were very clear about their intent.
I just can't work with a company that forces me to change my content/apps to fit their ridiculously greedy model. Sure, she could just go somewhere else, but Apple is in deals with Pearson and Harcourt, and will be handling a significant number of school texts exclusively.
I wonder if they'll force those partners to not mention competing services.
* UPDATE *
Now that I've mulled... I don't understand why she doesn't just upload the 2nd book to iBookstore, then link to IT in the 1st book and resubmit. Sure, it's bullshit, but Apple owns their own marketplace and can do any stupid bullshit they want. If you want to play on their field, you have to fondle, I mean use their balls.
If Amazon reciprocated, they would remove potentially 34,557 books that mention Apple, including over 80 that mention iBookstore. If they just went for books that had LINKS to apple, there's over 2,000 of those. I just don't see Amazon being as stupid as Apple, ever, that they would censor writers in this way.
This is height of hypocrisy since Apple apparently uses Amazon S3 in their iMessage app, according to an earlier HN post that links here : http://imgur.com/fwXX5
I'm not defending Apple but your point is completely irrelevant. They don't want products in their store to mention a competitor. That has nothing to do with them using a service which they don't have a competitor for.
What I meant was that Amazon is a competitor to the iBookstore (so naturally Apple would prefer not to sell products which mention Amazon). I was pointing out that Apple using Amazon's cloud services is irrelevant because Apple does not compete with them on that product.
Sheer insanity. Mary is a moron and her app users are prime targets for hackers.
Just because the test coverage passes, doesn't mean the code doesn't do something nefarious behind the scenes.
If Mary doesn't review the code before release, she deserves the rapture her customers will bestow upon her when she finds out Josh was paid by a competitor to decimate her business.
It's not that I believe people are inherently evil, I just believe that you need to review every patch to make sure it does what it's supposed to do and no more.
Was it not clear from the story that she was able to review the code? It's GitHub… is this any better?
Mary is naturally skeptical at first. The "old" Mary would never have
considered
performing a release without testing it on her laptop first! However, since
her
code has 100% test coverage and Josh is a reliable community member and she
can
ensure that the tests have passed and she is able to review the code sanity
and
security online via GitHub, she happily agrees to perform the release.
ACTUALLY, in 1961, Leonard Kleinrock of MIT invented the concept of wide area networks in his paper "Information Flow In Large Communication Nets" (1).
After that, in 1964, a RAND employee by the name of Paul Baran wrote a paper entitled "On Distributed Communications Networks"(2), furthering the concepts outlined by Kleinrock.
It wasn't until AFTER Lawrence Roberts, also of MIT, wrote "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers", that ARPA funded research on the idea.
FINALLY, it was National Physical Laboratory in England that created the first wide-area packet switching network in 1967.
So, NO, the government didn't INVENT the Internet. They built a closed, packet switching network that the public could not access, based on principles and ideas generated at a smattering of schools and PRIVATE COMPANIES.
Dallas/Fort Worth has had virtual libraries for years. You can check out ebooks just as you can real books from the physical library, and they maintain a fixed number of licenses. It's using http://www.overdrive.com/ as the basis.
