Digital Trends and Leif Iverson was gracious enough to have me on their podcast last week, and we took the opportunity to talk:

• How To Read e-Books On Your iPhone
• Apple Tablet: Latest Updates
• CTIA 2009: Best Of Show

Digital Trends has also updated with a great new look, and more gadget content than you can shake an accelerometer at, so be sure to check it out.

Mac developer and Panic luminary Steven Frank’s public break-up with the iPhone over Apple’s capricious App Store policy was one of the few so grounded in rationale and reason we couldn’t discount it, and neither could Apple’s Senior VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller.

While Schiller previously responded to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber over concerns about the Ninjawords app, Schiller’s response to Steve Frank was different in kind, if similar in sentiment:

I haven’t sought Phil’s explicit permission to republish the letter, so I won’t do so here. But to summarize, he said: “we’re listening to your feedback”. Not all of my suggested solutions were viable, he said, but they were taking it all in as they continue to evolve the app store.

He went on to say that the rumors of widespread e-book app rejection I’d heard were false — that specifically one e-book app had been rejected because it facilitated iPhone-to-iPhone sharing of (potentially copyrighted) books. But that otherwise, there was no sweeping ban on e-book readers.

First, it’s interesting to see such high level and yet fairly intimate intervention by an Apple executive when it comes to the App Store. It’s not an open letter by Steve Jobs — it’s something subtler, and yet seemingly targeted to engender the type of good will that could give Apple the time and good faith they need to fix the App Store approval process if — and it’s a huge if — they truly take the time to fix it. And that’s the fulcrum of actions and results upon which Schiller’s intervention will ultimately succeed or fail.

Second, Steven Frank is now left to wonder whether to continue his boycott of the iPhone given the lack of those observable actions visible results, or to extend his hand back to Apple and give them that same second chance.

It will be interesting to see what happens next…

A couple new and interesting cases of App Store rejection, including the stripping Perfect Acumen and owner, Khalid Shaik, of their developer account, and ejecting their 900+ application already in the store, and the blanket rejection of E-Books — both nebulously tied to copyright infringement or the fear thereof.

Details after the break…

First one comes via MobileCrunch and tells of the aforementioned Khalid Shaik who, using a team of 26 Indian and Pakistani based programmers, turned out a mind-numbing (in more ways than one) 943 apps in the last year. These apps aggregated text or images from the Internet around topics like army news, wrestling news, sexy ladies, etc. and typically sold for $4.99. The only problem, of course, is that Shaik didn’t own the rights to the content he was using, and when you start trying to profit off racy pictures of young starlets you pull from the internet, the copyright police will come knocking. (Though apparently other developers were incensed over his marketing methods, and many users were none to pleased with the quality of the apps they purchased).

Apple claims it received complaints about more than one hundred of Shaik’s apps, and since Shaik has failed to respond, they’ve stripped his company, Perfect Acumen, of their developer license and removed his apps from the App Store.

MobileCrunch points out similar developer, Brighthouse Labs and their 1000+ apps have yet to be removed, though Apple may simply be at an earlier point in their internal, infamously opaque ejection process for Brighthouse.

Second, Erica Sadun at TUAW has learned that Apple has begun a blanket rejection of E-Books and E-Book readers due to concerns about copyright infringement. TUAW says there’s no evidence to suggest Apple is trying to bully the deck clear in order to launch E-Books as part of iTunes to coincide with their mythically rumored iTablet.

Apple could be responding to the recent Amazon Kindle debacle, where 1984 and Animal Farm were yanked from the service due to copyright infringement claims — not all books enter the public domain in all countries at the same time, apparently.

Says TUAW:

Apple cannot police the developers and will not allow possibly fraudulent postings on their store. Apple does not want to be in the position of vetting rights claims.

By letting E-Books and E-Book readers into the App Store, Apple will no doubt get DMCA (or equivalent) take down letters by publishers who believe their rights are being infringed. However, this is a cost of doing business everyone from YouTube (which is built into the iPhone) to niche forums (many of which can be access by the also built-in MobileSafari browser) have to face.

Set yourself up as lone gatekeeper, it’s hard to feel sympathy when you start cutting corners to get your job done…

This time, same as the last time, the initial, stupefying rejection of e-book reader Eucalyptus has been followed up by web outrage and now App Store acceptance. (Can we officially call these the 4 stages of App Store grief’ing now?) From developer Montgomerie’s blog (via Macworld):

Earlier today I received a phone call from an Apple representative. He was very complimentary about Eucalyptus. We talked about the confusion surrounding its App Store rejections, which I am happy to say is now fully resolved. He invited me to re-build and submit a version of Eucalyptus with no filters for immediate approval, and that full version is now available on the iPhone App Store. [$9.99 - iTunes link]

Eucalyptus provides a pretty amazing UI through which to access all the free content at Project Gutenberg. If you enjoy classic literature and drop-dead gorgeous iPhone interaction, check it out and let us know what you think!