Something is off about this story. A brief glance in the iBookstore shows tons of books on Amazon and Amazon products, including books on how to sell your work via Amazon.
We're talking entire books who's sole purpose is to promote or support the use of Amazon. Clearly Apple has no problem with those.
My reading of this is a complete miscommunication. Nowhere in Apple's email does it state they had a problem with content. I really have no idea how she jumped to that conclusion. The very simple and likely explanations are either (1) she did not remove all links or (2) the reviewer did not closely check to see if she removed all links.
In other words, yet another story about Apple "censorship" that turns out not to be about Apple censorship.
People make a big deal of it when it first comes out and bash Apple when its on the front page of HN.
Now that it has turned out to be false, it is no longer on the front page of HN.
Next time someone says something bad about Apple, the denizens of HN will talk about how "apple's always censoring" and this will be one of the stories they're talking about.
Just as they said effectively the same thing in this comment.
Are those books from major publishers? She's going the self-pub route so Apple may not be willing to play games with multi-national publishing companies but will screw over indies.
If not, I don't know, but having followed her news letter I would be more than a little surprised if she were fudging things here, it gives her no real benefit.
No. This makes the assumption Apple applies it's rules equally. It does not. Making the assumption that X got approved, so Y should get approved as well is a poor assumption.
Your best bet is to try and stick to the rules. And if you get denied, just resubmit and hope the next reviewer approves it.
I've been thru Apple's review process enough times, and been rejected enough times to say that Apple does apply its rules equally.[1] Given the responses I've gotten back from the reviewers, it is clear that I've interacted with multiple reviewers, and I've never seen a deviation.
There is the occasional mistake, but the very telling thing about this article is she never tells us the specific rule that she broke. Hiding this information is important for making it look like Apple is arbitrary.
But the thing is, when you're rejected by Apple, they cite the specific rule.
Since there are lots of books about Amazon in the bookstore, and since there is no rule against publishing books about Amazon, this story does not add up.
[1] Every rejection resulted in me immediately getting pissed off, much like the original OP. But once I calmed down I realized either I misunderstood the rejection, and the fix was easy and the rejection was legitimate, or the rejection was due to me making an error that would produce a bad experience for the customer, sometimes because I misunderstood the guidelines, occasionally because I was being lazy without realizing it, and often just because of a mistake or bug.
Since Apple is uniform in the way they apply the rules, and the rules are not so specific as to cover specific bugs, it does take some interpretation to figure out what they are saying. If you don't take that step, its easy to fly off the handle and assume Apple is being arbitrary when they aren't. The reality is, it just means you didn't take the time to read what they wrote you and comprehend it.
Of course the rejections feel personal, and I won't tolerate a company that won't play by its own rules, but they've never been unfair to me, and other than a few mistakes that were corrected, I'm not aware of them being unfair to others.
However we get a lot of these kinds of stories where someone says one thing, but they never cite the specific rule, or are evasive, which indicates that they're just trying to get publicity and were really rejected for other reasons.
How can you claim to have evidence that apple applies it's rules equally based entirely off your own experience of the process? That makes no sense as an argument.
I think you misunderstood what was meant by 'Apple applies it's rules equally'. I read it to mean it was on a per submission basis not on a per submitter basis. Not that I readily agree given the anecdote just presented.
I read it that the claim was that apple applies it's rules equally, which in plain reading wouldn't differentiate between a per submission and per submitter interpretation as it would be applying the rules equally regardless.
I was just meaning that if you were to go and try and find out whether apple were applying their rules reasonably equally, then you would need a lot more data than just the submissions of one individual, purely by the definition of what you are trying to research.
Your question sums up the entirety of what's wrong with hacker news. I'm the only one commenting here who has actual evidence of the situation, which I presented.
You reject it because I talked only about my experiences, and my experiences go against your prejudice.
Yet every other commeenter in this thread is making assertions, without providing any evidence what-so-ever. Often very broad assertions about how apple regularly censors.
Your are blinded by your bigotry to the fact that those assertions are completely unsupported.
And since Hacker News is overrrun with unthinking ideologically oriented people like you, no useful discussion can happen in these debates.
> That makes no sense as an argument.
You are so anti-intellectual you can't even recognize an argument.
> Book file contains links from competitors: Amazon, in the chapter Q&A 6, under “Question 9″
I'm sure books dedicated to Amazon will contain links to them, so I think this just adds a little bit more evidence to the stories of Apple's inconsistent review process.
We're talking entire books who's sole purpose is to promote or support the use of Amazon. Clearly Apple has no problem with those.