That could be a thought, or goal, of theirs, to push content creators to their platform instead of through Amazon and Rhapsody middle men.
Users will and won't care depending on several factors. I can imagine that hardcore Amazon Kindle users will be pissed that they have one less platform to read their books on.
The Kindle syncs books and your position in the book between devices. It's a value proposition that's hard to beat. Even if you have the same book on your iBooks I think users will get pissed that they have to search to find where they finished reading it on their other devices.
In this scenario, if you have the Kindle app installed on your iPad, and if you buy a subscription to something, you can do that from your kindle, your ipad, your computer, whatever. Kindle is cool that way.
Apple is saying, hey, if you do it through the ipad kindle app, we expect 30% of the subscription fee from the publisher. AND the publisher is not allowed to offer cheaper prices to off-ipad purchases.... so the only logical move for Kindle is "umm, okay, we'll stop providing a kindle ipad app and we'll take our customers elsewhere"
Leaving only the Apple-provided bookstore to handle subscriptions.
They don't want people using their platform to launch recurring-revenue models for content and then not get a piece of the subscription pie.
The point is that creators already have to deal with worse than 30% scalping when dealing with other distributors of their content. For example, Activision/Blizzard has the infrastructure to sell/distribute games from their own website, however, when they also sell those games through a big retail distributor like Walmart, they have to give Walmart a huge cut (I'm guessing more than 30%) to entice Walmart to sell that game through their stores. Now, Activision/Blizzard cannot sell the game for 10% less than the retail price from their own website (at least, not initially) because otherwise, Walmart says to Blizzard/Activision "If you don't sell the game from your website at the retail price, we won't sell your game through Walmart."
Even though it's a negotiation, it's mutually beneficial to the content producers and the distributors.
The game Apple is playing is that they want to take the same cut from content distributors as they would from content creators. It's a gutsy move by Apple because those content distributors are already taking a cut by reselling content from content creators. They wouldn't be willing to do this if they weren't also making an aggressive push to be a content distributor of all digital media.
Users will and won't care depending on several factors. I can imagine that hardcore Amazon Kindle users will be pissed that they have one less platform to read their books on.
The Kindle syncs books and your position in the book between devices. It's a value proposition that's hard to beat. Even if you have the same book on your iBooks I think users will get pissed that they have to search to find where they finished reading it on their other devices.