This is why I don’t use Apple products or DRM media

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

This company is going out of business because they put all their eggs in a very delicate and quite frankly evil basket:

BeamItDown Software and the iFlow Reader will cease operations as of May 31, 2011. We absolutely do not want to do this, but Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device.

If you’re a company, and you do this:

We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game.

you need to have your head examined :-) This is not the first time this has happened, and it will most certainly not be the last time. Apple will do anything it can to make a buck over other company’s back!

Not just the company is being royally screwed over by Apple:

Many of you have purchased books and would like to keep them. You may still be able to read them using iFlow Reader although we cannot guarantee that it will work beyond May 31, 2011 […] your computer which will let you access them with Adobe Digital Editions or any other ebook application that is compatible with Adobe DRM protected epubs.

So iFlowReader’s have probably also lost all their ebooks because they had DRM on them. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a technology which restricts media to a certain application or device; opening it in third-party applications is usually impossible.

And that’s why I have never and will never buy an Apple product, or use any media that is DRM protected.