Personal Content Production

In my efforts to give Apple as much of my money as possible, I've recently been experimenting with creating books in iPhoto and ordering up large prints of some photos. For the most part, I've been quite satisfied. I like iPhoto a lot, even if it is a bit slow on my admittedly low end Mac mini. I have had iPhoto crash on me a couple of times and when it crashed, it took some of my work with it. That's no good, and now I don't trust it completely. Every half hour or so, I'll do a Quit and Restart of iPhoto, just to gurantee my changes aren't lost. Man I hate doing that.

Anyway, while looking through my nicely bound and printed iPhoto books, I got to thinking..."Why doesn't Apple do this for all sorts of content production?". Apple likes to make a big deal of their Made on a Mac slogan. It even says so right in the back of the iPhoto books. They are also looking to pull more people to their platform and they've always been known to have the full solution. For instance, with iPhoto you can import and organize your own photos and then you can order prints and books. You can make your own songs in Garage Band. How come you can't order your own CDs with your own art on them? You can make your own DVDs in iDVD. How come you can't order your own DVDs with disc art and cover art? Sure you can burn these things and write on them with a sharpie. You can even print decent looking art on your home printer, but you can print decent looking photos too, but I'd still rather pay a few bucks to get the size I want, the quality I want, and get it right the first time.

I first thought this might be a copyright thing. Apple probably doesn't want to get in the middle of producing small runs of bootlegs, but this issue exists with photos too. There are even cases of some places refusing to print photos because they look too professional and therefore are probably covered by someone else's copyright. So maybe they lack an ordering system. No, wait, they already built that for their online store and the iPhoto books. So, they have content producing users. They have content producing apps that they own and can update easily. They have an ordering and distribution system. What's the hold up? Can any of you think of a reason they aren't doing this (other than cost of running the business)?

Maybe this will get solved when the iTMS lets the little guy upload and sell their stuff. I'm still waiting for that one :)