Eucalyptus gets past App Store wowsers

Stephen Withers
Monday, 25 May 2009 11:06

Opinion and Analysis

The Eucalyptus e-book reader for the iPhone has gone on sale at the App Store following an initial rejection by Apple.

One of the problems with Apple's decision to individually approve applications that developers submit to the App Store is that some things get through when they (probably) shouldn't, and others are rejected when they should get through the process.

The latest example of the second kind is Eucalyptus, an e-book reader.

Eucalyptus downloads and formats books from the Project Gutenberg collection, which mainly consists of out-of-copyright titles but also includes some in-copyright items with the permission of the rightsholder.

And in accordance with the Project Gutenberg licence, Eucalyptus's developer pays 20 percent of the gross profits to the project, so let's not hear anything about charging for other people's work - the fee is for the software, not the content.

But back to the rejection-approval flip-flop.

What happened was that whichever Apple employee was given the job of vetting Eucalyptus, he or she noticed that one of the books available for download was the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - and promptly rejected it.

What happened next? Please read on.