on 2012-01-22 13:50 Igor Roshchin wrote
Apple's license (EULA) forbids you from distributing your work created using Apple software.
that's not correct; Apple forbids you from _selling_ it, but not from _distributing_ it (your term), outside of Apple's distribution system
the textbooks you can create are much like apps, and the restrictions here are a bit looser than the restrictions when you use Apple's "free" software to create apps; there are dozens of other ways to prepare rich content for iOS, not to mention other devices, so i don't think there's much chance of lock-in, except perhaps for a certain range of textbook publishing; textbooks are already an extremely closed world, and i think Apple's move may jostle that world bit at first, then a lot eventually — a good thing in my mind
and from what i understand this _free_ tool is pretty good; it must have cost Apple a lot to develop; there are lots of tools which produce output that has license restrictions; in this case Apple has done a pretty good job of lubricating the process
Apple is not the only player, by any means; aside from other corpses competing to create "ecosystems" (Facebook recently acquired Strobe, which was producing a promising commercial framework on top of SproutCore), there is also strong open-source action; Ember.js (SproutCore 2) and Baker, for example
that said i was underwhelmed with Apple's new offerings; i worked for years in book and magazine publishing, and have some ebook creation in my future, but so far i don't see any strong reason to use Apple's tools; it will be interesting to see how the publishing industry evolves but we are very very much in the infancy of digital publishing
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