iBooks 2 is actually a web-app store

Think about it, Apple never planned the native application Store we have today. They were forced into it by the genius hackers who made amazing apps for the first jailbroken iPhone.

When introducing the first iPhone, Steve said web applications are everything you needed to enable rich application functionality.


Hello iBooks 2

Besides the chrome web store, there aren't any popular web app selling platforms out there. And definitely not mobile.

iBooks author is actually a visual IDE

You can create and sell rich pages that include applicable functionality using JavaScript. The gazillion of content web sites out there can now start charging for their text, images, video and JavaScript code for widgets.

Bigger than the App store

The app store is very big, but not as big as it could be, because iOS apps are written in Objective C which is not as easy or popular as other languages. iBooks "BookApps" (that's how they should be called) are written in in drag & drop, and the complicated stuff is in JavaScript, one of the most widespread languages in the world, thanks to the world wide web. In short, writing BookApps is much easier than writing native apps. BooksApps won't have most of the interesting API's like accelerometer, storage access and camera, but they might come one day. And till then, most content apps and simple functionality one could be written faster and easier for the iBooks platform.

The chargeable web

I'm not sure if this is Apple's goal, but they are actually creating a chargeable version of the web, from the second iBooks author was out, most content websites can easily create a chargeable version of their content.