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It seems that Jim Dalrymple can’t understand why people were unhappy with the iBooks Author. This is confusing; you may disagree with people’s take on it, and that’s normal in both the tech press and in the Apple community (I’m reminded to some healthy debating at last year’s SecondConf about whether or not Mac App Store / Sandboxing was the end of the world). But being completely confused about this?

Jim mostly makes the same arguments he made last week, which continue to be unpersuasive to those of us on the flip side. To channel Jim, “I’m not sure if [he] just misunderstood”, or if he’s simply repeating them to convince himself they’re true, which is the exact problem with that sort of assumption that everyone must just be freaking out for no reason.

A recap:

Apple is providing free tools for authors to create books. If, however, you create an iBook using Apple’s tools and you want to sell it, then you have to use the iBookstore and give Apple its cut. That sounds fair to me

Except this isn’t about being fair or not; Jim’s mostly a great writer and I’ve enjoyed having the Loop in my newsfeesd, so it’s confusing to me that he deliberately keeps the analysis at a 4th grade playground level. This isn’t about being fair, it’s about the fact that Apple is doing something rather unprecedented in software development: making a move toward’s content ownership with the EULA of a tool.

Disclaimer: I am not your/yet a lawyer and nothing is legal advice

You can export all of the text and use Amazon’s tools to create a book.

Nor is the situation that cut and dry. As Jim Dovey (who did a lot of technical digging and analysis into the new iBooks format) wisely pointed out on Twitter

“Let’s say you have a book which has lots of layout needs, and want to add one iBooks-only feature, you must build it twice. Another problem is that people will spend their time creating perfectly-fine-in-everything-else ePubs using this tool.”

I’m not 100% confident that Dovey’s outlook is right, but I’m not definitely not sure that it’s wrong, and from an ownership perspective, this is really worrisome. I imagine that you could claim that Apple won’t try to actively exercise the more draconian approaches that the EULA text might allow, but then why write it that way? Apple’s not the type to rush things, so this EULA probably means someone thought it through and decided this was the best approach. That’s not a good call.

Jim (Dalrymple…having both the Jims be Jim D is difficult) eventually concludes that this is the same as iOS, an analogy which really isn’t accurate to the situation.

On the App Store I may have to pay Apple $99 for access to the tools beforehand, and cut them in on the profits in exchange for hosting, payment processing, marketing and other things to use the app store, but I can do anything I want with an .ipa; sell it on Cydia, distribute it ad-hoc or enterprise (for profit), or do anything else that I’ve been able to do with compiled data since the dawn of computing. Tons of people push the bounds with what you can do with non-App Store functionality, and it’s good for the ecosystem that alternative distribution innovation keeps happening.

Truth of the matter is that Apple’s move really is unprecedented. There are some disagreements about the merits of people’s different arguments (many about file formats, but Gruber’s covered that and I tend to find his analysis persuasive), but to argue that this isn’t even understandable and that people’s reactions were completely unwarranted? Come On