http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/lawyer-ibooks-auth... The relevant working for this article states: >To extend Booth's recording studio analogy, you would still own the songs you wrote for your album, including the music and lyrics. You could go to another recording studio and make all new recordings of those songs and distribute them however you want. Likewise, you could take the text of a book and use different software to make an ePub, PDF, or Mobi file for publishing elsewhere.
"The contract only tries to control the version made using this software," Booth told Ars. That was more or less what I had read elsewhere. This interpretation means that you can do whatever you want with your work, but Apple's iBook Author software is basically free to use to generate material for Apple's store on the condition that you use it only to publish to iBooks (unless it's free, than you can export anywhere). So basically "When you're publishing to our platform, you can use this free tool to do that."
any book or other work you generate using this software That strikes me as an odd definition but Ed Bott also updates to note that the contents of the work can be extracted as plain text and used elsewhere in other formats. So it looks like it is not as bad as at first glance. Also I didn't notice a justification of Booth's interpretation of 'work'. If I thought I could retain my sanity while agonizing over legalese I would look elsewhere for his justification. There are still serious problems though. Apple still control any work created that utilizes unique features of the ibooks format. That strikes me as a lot of control to hand over. It is also clear from other articles on this topic that the main victim is the reader rather than the author. In order to use the interactive features of this format a reader must use an ipad. If authors start to design books specifically as an interactive experience then certain works will not be available to readers who either can't afford an ipad or whose conscience wouldn't allow them to use one. I would hope that such interactive features were available on other platforms and formats but never bet on it. After all Apple is the type of company that would happily patent the rectangle if it could. Thanks for the link ecib.