Recently unearthed documents released by the US House Judiciary Committee as part of a big-tech investigation reveal why users can’t buy Kindle books on iOS.
As part of its ongoing investigation into the dominance of tech companies, the antitrust subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives has uncovered a treasure trove of Apple’s internal communications and documents. Some of those communications are from Jobs himself.
Two sets of those communications (emails, specifically) reveal the discussions that led to restrictions on the purchase of digital books from third-party platforms like Amazon. Emails were first seen by The edge.
In 2010, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing and chief applications officer, Phil Schiller, wrote to Jobs and other Apple executives to explain an Amazon Kindle commercial promoting the service’s cross-platform capabilities.
“While the main message is that there are Kindle applications on many mobile devices, the secondary message … is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android,” wrote Schiller. “It’s not fun to watch it.”
In response, Jobs replied, “It is time to [Amazon] to decide to use our payment mechanism or withdraw. And I think it’s time to start applying this evenly, except for existing subscriptions (but applying it for new ones). ”
Another conversation introduced a draft of Apple’s subscription policies around February 2011. Apple finally released subscriptions to the App Store that year, along with new rules that prompted Amazon and other booksellers to remove the option to purchase books in the app. .
“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 that it’s prohibitive for many things, “Jobs wrote.
She claimed that it was part of a strategy to compel the publisher to join the iBooks platform. Cook, for her part, did not explicitly answer the question and stated that there were many reasons why an application may be blocked.
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