[dsr_]

Even ordinary users are beginning to understand this. My sister was upset at Amazon because the Kindle app on her iPod would not let her buy books directly. After she found out that Apple was demanding a 30% cut of those sales, she changed her mind. Now she's unhappy with Apple.

I understand the impulse to look at however many millions of IOS devices and to immediately want to get into that market, but the long tail is not a comfortable place to be in a land of 99c standard prices. Having an arbitrary and capricious landlord makes it worse.

[vacri]

Why is she unhappy that a retailer gets their cut for supplying the MITM service?

I don't like Apple philosophy in the slightest and don't own any apple gear (old ipods excepted), so I'm not a fan of theirs in the slightest. But this 30% thing is just a non-issue. They're a retailer providing content. 30% is a boringly normal number for the retailers cut.

If amazon wanted to share their profits with the retailer (like book publishers have to with brick and mortar stores) then those books would be available. If Apple allowed those purchases for free, then they don't get any benefit for providing the service.

[dsr_]

Why is she unhappy?

At a basic level, it's because her mental model of How Things Work broke. She thinks that it's reasonable that using the Amazon Kindle application on any platform she ought to be able to buy books from Amazon as part of that app. After all, she's signed in, Amazon knows who she is, at most they ought to ask for a password confirmation to let her spend her money.

And that doesn't work.

So she was unhappy with Amazon. Reasonable. She was so unhappy, she posted on Facebook about it, where a dozen of her friends pointed out that Apple wanted a 30% cut of content sold on their device.

Their device. Not her device. She paid for it, but now she sees that it isn't hers.

She thought that an iPod was like a computer: you use it, you select software to put on it, you use the software.

Her mental model breaks AGAIN, because she thought she owned the iPod. Now she finds out that it's actually an Apple-owned store that doesn't like competition.

Apple got their benefit when they sold her a device. They got more benefit when they sell her software to go on the device. Why should they get more benefit for interfering in a transaction between her and Amazon?

She knows what rent-seeking means, and she doesn't appreciate it.

[vacri]

Does she also have a problem that Amazon takes the lions share of the remaining money, instead of it going to the authors? Amazon is just another MITM - a facilitator of getting product to consumer.

Same argument with the kindle, right? "Amazon got their benefit when they sold her a device"?

Perhaps she doesn't realise that the App Store is the same kind of service that Amazon provides - after all, the Kindle is also locked down. You have to do Frowned-On things to read your other ebooks on it.

Perhaps you should inform her of this, and watch her mental model break yet again.

[ciudilo]

30% cut only applies to subscriptions so in this case it is Amazon's choice to sell books on their website and not from app directly.

[thorstadt]

The 30% applies to all in-app purchases, and attempting to circumvent IAP is against Apple's guidelines.

http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/ref=cm_cd_ttp_ef_tft_tp?_...