There's been a lot of heat and fury surrounding the iBooks Author terms and conditions ever since the service was introduced last week. To boil the controversy down to basics, Apple has introduced a private protocol extension that takes EPUB to the next generation. And then they created a business model that uses this proprietary technology to monetize commercial transactions. This runs right in line with my predictions from earlier this month. This decision, to build a proprietary format on an open standard, has led to a lively debate about whether a member of an open standards organization shoul
