They are using their dominance in the tablet market to own another market, exclusively on their terms. Similiar to what Microsoft did when bundling IE with Windows. I would not be surprised to see an antitrust case against Apple in the near future.

If you don't like the iBooks Author EULA, don't use it. iBooks Author isn't the only way to publish books on iBooks. You could use any other authoring tool to generate EPUB books and sell them on iBooks. And heck, that's if you want to sell on the iBookstore.

In fact, since ePub is just a superset of html, you can even author everything in a text editor.

I'm still struggling to see what the uproar is all about.

Only you can read Kindle books on the iPad with the Kindle app, also with the Stanza app and tons of others. Also plain ole PDFs with the built-in viewer.

And iBooks is not bundled, you have to download it.

And even if it was, bundling IE was not what got MS in trouble in respect to antitrust laws. It was things like pushing computer makers in under the table deals and such.

Actually lots of programs are built-in to any modern OS, from browsers to ftp to pdf viewer to text editors. Nothing anti-trust about it.

Others can do it because they don't have a monopoly. Windows still must be distributed without its media player in Europe.

And Apple already tried to abuse its position with the Kindle app by forcing a distribution commission for books it didn't sell. Also a guaranteed lowest sales price. They've hardly been kind to competition on their platform.

"""And Apple already tried to abuse its position with the Kindle app by forcing a distribution commission for books it didn't sell."""

Well, regarding Apple forcing Amazon to play a distribution commissions for books sold through the iPad, it was either that, or allowing other companies a free ride to sell on Apple's platform, the Apple spend tons of R&D on, without Apple getting anything.

Apple puts those restrictions because it considers not just the hardware of the iPhone, but also the App Store as a platform that it have invested money, engineering and infrastructure in, and wants to profit from it too. Apple doesn't believe in the old mantra "apple only makes profit from the hardware". With multi-billion app/song/book/etc sales, why should they?

Allowing others to sell stuff in your platform without paying you makes sense if your platform is an operating system.

It does not make sense if your platform is an application market.

Now, regarding "being kind to competition on their platform", indeed they have been not. But they would have been foolish to be. They invest in building a game changing phone device, then a game changing app store AND a game changing mobile platform, why would they invite competition in their own platform? Let competition exist between multiple platforms.

In practice, it doesn't seem that bad. It's no worse than having to rewrite parts of your app to submit it to other mobile stores. You just have to make sure you write the actual book outside their tool, in order to be able to sell your book in case Apple rejects it.

In theory, it's an appalling way of doing it. They could have simply put in the eBooks Store rules that you couldn't sell the book anywhere else if it was accepted by them.

They aren't saying you can't sell your book anywhere else; you just can't, for example, take the Author export file and go sell that on the Kindle store - you'd have to lay it out again.

No, this would be like Apple legally prohibiting you from porting any code you wrote in Xcode to other platforms. It is highly abusive, and sets a dangerous precedent if we allow them to get away with it.