imitation may be flattering, but Apple ain't delicious

The tubes are all agog about the iPad (once the jokes made by every tech writer's inner ten-year-old died down). The iPad hopes to be, among other things, the standard in e-readers. At the big Apple hoohah, Jobs introduced iBooks and it's snazzy bookshelf interface.

Anyone remotely familiar with Delicious Library thought they had just bought the company and tooled that interface into iTunes. Nope. They tried to buy Delicious Library, and offered jobs to its creator and all his staff. Wil Shipley and Delicious Monster declined, and Apple just copied and pasted their work into iBooks anyway. Kind of a dick move on Jobs part, bit Shipley is taking it like a grown-up (at least interviews) and comes across as a much better person than Jobs or the iBook developers.

This is what the Delicious Library bookshelf looks like:

This is what the new iBooks looks like on the iPad:

Yeah.

The iTunes interface is rumored to be identical to Delicious Monster's Library.

Seeing as Apple has tried to take them over several times, and has given them more than one "Best This or That" award at MacWorld, it's not this is a happy accident. In the words of John Brownlee at the Cult of Mac, "The inspiration and, some might say, downright plagiarism seems pretty clear: it’s frankly impossible that Apple was unfamiliar with Shipley’s work."

The Washing Post took this up, and Shipley comes off more shiny than the Apple that took his eye.

The Washington Post/Tech Crunch: "Think iBooks Looks Familiar? You're Not The Only One."