Are eBooks Next to Be Cut from Apple’s App Store?

Yesterday TechCruch ran a speculative article wondering if–after trimming sexually explicit and a few other apps from the App store–Apple would hack into the 27,000 available eBooks in advance of the release of iBooks. The story is perhaps a bit alarmist, maybe even a little dangerous, though the author makes clear near the beginning that “I should make it clear that I haven’t heard anything about Apple removing the myriad book apps from the App Store.”

But the recent App Store pruning does raise a question about how open Apple will let iBooks be. Will it be as wild and wooly as Amazon’s Kindle store, where there are tens of thousands of books no one would want, but which are there in case someday someone wants one?

Apple’s obsession with secrecy and control does make it a slightly nerve-wracking company to oversee the dissemination of eBooks. Though it seems unlikely the company will start dumping eBooks from its App store–that might make Apple unpopular.

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