The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission and Apple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and then some. The six largest publishers have now all adopted the agency model. These publishers account for nearly 90% of all ebooks sold. Random House was the last publisher to adopt the agency model, which they did on March 1 of this year. You may have noticed that all 17,000 Random House titles disappeared from our catalog on February 28. They appeared in Apple’s iBooks catalog the following day. We, as well as all other small booksellers, have yet to complete an agency agreement with Random House. Up until February 28, these were our most profitable items because we were still getting a 50% discount on these ebooks. With an eight-hour notice, all of these titles disappeared from our store as well as the stores of all other small ebook sellers.

Five of us spent nearly a year and a half of our lives and over a million dollars in cash and sweat equity developing the iFlowReader app with its unique AutoScrolling approach to reading that many of you really like. We think that our product is the best one available on iOS for reading ebooks. We had extensive plans to make it even better. We looked to the future of ebooks for inspiration while Apple and others were looking at the printed books of the past. This explains the cute, but gratuitous page turning animations, and old-timey bookshelves, which are all very amusing at first, but not very useful in the end. —iflowreader.com.