30% would be somewhat defensible if Apple provided the CDN for the content. As they don't, they're taxing convenience and taking it far too high. The 5-10% number holds a lot more water.
On the flip side, young upstarts will still lap the system up. Apple has has given them a chance to get one up on old media. The problem is it makes Apple a very large, capricious gorilla in the market.
My problem was more about setting restrictions on what I could charge my customer. If the customer wants to pay the premium for buying from the iphone application, fine by me.
As far as a "reasonable" fee, I think it should be more in the range of what a credit card charges.
young upstarts will still lap the system up
I totally agree here. I wonder if it's a viable long-term strategy. In the first wave Apple's store got a bit of a reputation for having a lot of crap in it.
But they could be doing the following, which I think would be pretty brilliant:
We have a new platform, and a new way of interacting with media and with each other. What is the best use of this? What ideas will be seen as valuable? Well, let's just get as many ideas as we can as cheaply as we can, let the system percolate for a bit and see what is great.
When we know what is great, we'll then steer things strongly that way either by (1) building more stuff in-house and relegating indie applications to the cellar, or (2) very tight restrictions on the devs. This amounts to a huge marketing experiment that they make a ton of money from rather than having to spend a ton of money. Brilliant.
It wouldn't be defensible as long as they force them maintain the same price. For some of the companies, 30% of the profit is all they've got, perhaps even more than they've got. The biggest problem with this is Apple wouldn't allow them to increase prices. So Amazon wouldn't be able to sell an e-book for $14 to compensate on iOS, and $10 on their own site.
On the flip side, young upstarts will still lap the system up. Apple has has given them a chance to get one up on old media. The problem is it makes Apple a very large, capricious gorilla in the market.