As part of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust investigation into Apple, lawmakers have released a variety of internal Apple emails. A collection of those emails offers new details about Apple’s long battle with Amazon to allow in-app purchases on the Kindle app.
As it stands today, the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad does not allow users to purchase e-books directly. Users can read the ebooks they have already purchased, but to purchase new ones, they have to use Safari. This is how Amazon avoids preventing Apple from reducing e-book purchases by 30%, which would be necessary if Amazon sold e-books directly within the Kindle app.
The important thing to remember is that this type of arrangement was not always the case. Until early 2011, you could purchase Kindle e-books directly from the Kindle app on iOS. As first discovered by the EdgeTwo sets of emails included in the internal documents include conversations between Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller and other Apple executives regarding this situation.
In an email, Schiller explained that Apple initially made an exception for Amazon because “users would buy books on a Kindle device and then access them on iPhone.” However, as Apple sold more iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch, Schiller thought it was time to drop this exception.
In fact, what really prompted Schiller to re-investigate this situation, according to the emails, is that Amazon ran a series of announcements on how he could still access his Kindle books if he switched from iPhone to Android or vice versa. In an email, Schiller wrote:
I just saw a new ad for the Amazon Kindle app on TV. It starts with a woman who uses an iPhone and buys and reads books with the Kindle app. The woman then switches to an Android phone and can still read all her books. While the main message is that there are Kindle apps on many mobile devices, the secondary message that cannot be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. It is not fun to watch.
In a separate email, Schiller said:
I think we should tell Amazon that based on their own television commercials, it is clear that using their app now violates our terms and guidelines and that they also need to use our in-app purchasing system for selling digital books. We should ask them to come back with a plan for how they will get their application to comply with the rules. Based on our past discussions, I hope you can choose not to do that. We may have to decide later whether to remove the Kindle app from the store or continue to allow an exception to our terms and guidelines for the Kindle app.
These conversations were taking place as Apple also planned to announce new App Store policies for subscriptions. In his response, Jobs said Apple could say that Amazon “should use our payment system for everything” and said the change was caused by new newspaper and magazine subscription policies. “If they want to compare us to Android, let’s force our vastly superior payment system,” Jobs wrote.
“It is time for them to use our payment mechanism or withdraw,” Jobs said in a separate email. In response to an email from Cue, Jobs also emphasized that iBooks would be the only bookstore on iOS devices:
I think this is all pretty simple: iBooks will be the only bookstore on iOS devices. We need to keep our heads up. One can read books bought elsewhere, just don’t buy / rent / subscribe from iOS without paying us, which we recognize is prohibitive for many things.
The next time you try to buy a book in the Kindle app on iPhone or iPad, you can remember these emails and what triggered the change in the first place: a Kindle TV ad that Schiller didn’t like. Of course, it can also be argued that it was correct for Apple to stop providing Amazon with an exception to in-app purchase requirements in the first place.
Read more:
FTC: We use automatic affiliate links that generate income. Plus.
Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:
