iPad Book Apps Hobbled: Only Existing Account-Holders Can Use The Apps, Google Books Booted

At the beginning of the year , Apple said it wanted 30% of everything sold through the iPad platform. You could sell almost anything - books, downloadable content, magazines, pictures of kittens - but, according to their subscription rules, everything had to go through Apple itself and you could not, in short, go out to a web page to complete the transaction. That promise - to shut down external web stores on the iPad - has been fulfilled and the Nook, Kindle, Kobo, and Google Books apps have just been either drastically changed or removed from the App Store entirely.