The last week introduction of the iBooks 2.0 and the free iBooks Author software by Apple marks the company’s intentional locking out of the open EPUB standard --- a standard to which the company has been reiterating unconditional support, for the last almost two years, in an attempt to lure digital book publishers and authors.

In the opinion of Apple-watchers, the company’s development of its iBooks platform on the back of an open standard can essentially be seen as a present-day version of software giant Microsoft’s 1990s policy of “embrace, extend, and extinguish.”

The behavior chiefly involves the process of entering a product category which supports a widely used standard, expanding that standard with proprietary capabilities, and finally using the differences to put rivals at a disadvantage.

That Apple is apparently sabotaging an open standard for ebooks is evident from the fact that the new iBooks 2.0 format featuring an addition to CSS extensions which, rather than being documented as part of the W3C standard, use a closed, proprietary Apple XML namespace.

Moreover, with the iBooks Author’s license agreement clearly underscoring Apple’s attempts at gaining the right to control access to its bookstore as well as curate its content, it is evident that the company has backed out of its open EPUB standard support, which it strongly stressed on in its original version of the April 2010 FAQ, published in coincidence with the iBooks debut. At that time, Apple had said in a definitive statement that “iBooks only uses books published in the ePub format”!