This won't go down well with publishers because Apple demands a whopping 30% of the end user price as a commission! Given that book publishing margins are tight anyway, this means that publishers will have to make iOS-derived pricing noncompetitive because their own e-books will be more expensive than either Apple's (if the title is available) or than their own pricing outside of the Appleverse, or they'll have to choose not to play at all on the , iPad or iPod.

There's a good reason why publishers may well choose not to play, as summarized by a friend of mine:

"iTunes takes a 30% cut of e-book sales. Under the Agency Model that went into effect last April when the iPad was released, the publisher gets 70% of the selling price of the e-book. It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that if Apple is taking 30% and the publisher is getting 70%, there's not much left for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, Kobo, Google, Sony, etc.

"The situation with non-Agency publishers is fuzzier but probably worse. The e-book stores typically pay about 50% of list price for those, then sell them at a significant discount off list (sometimes below cost). Giving Apple 30% of the selling price is going to be a big problem, regardless of whether prices have to be jacked up or the e-book store has to take substantial losses on each e-book sold.

"Apple is now [saying] that they to the existing e-reader apps If so, it's possible that, for a while at least, the only e-reader app available will be iBooks. The question for Amazon, B&N, Google, etc., is: Do they want to go to the effort to modify their e-reader apps even if they can't make a cent off of many (most?) of the e-books that they sell for those apps? It's possible that some of those e-reader apps will never come back.