According to Apple, their customers in the EU are not doing business with them but with me (someone explain why they’re taking 30% if I’m actually selling direct), and therefore my address and phone number must appear on each of my product pages.
Needless to say, that won’t be happening.
There are expensive solutions to this problem: get a P.O. box and a burner phone. I’m poor, so those solutions aren’t available to me.
There’s one 10% fee solution: go back to D2D for Apple distribution and let their address and phone number be published on every product page. That solution is available to me, but since I already have a countdown clock for fully divesting from D2D for philosophical reasons, I don’t really consider that an option.
I’m going to sit with this for a few days. Maybe Apple will walk it back. Maybe someone who isn’t a sleaze will come up with a co-op solution that doesn’t involve thousands of self-employed people exposing their home addresses and phone numbers to anyone who can look at Apple’s European stores (i.e., everyone). But probably what will happen is Apple will send a nag and I’ll click the little button that says “take all my books out of EU stores and fuck your massive privacy breach.” Then I’ll have to do some thinking about whether to continue listing with them at all.
Of note, to date, Amazon, Google, and Kobo, which also sell ebooks in the EU, have not interpreted the same law (Digital Services Act) as “expose every publisher’s contact information.” This isn’t a legal problem; this is an Apple problem.