Wal-Mart and Amazon go around Apple App Store

NEW YORK (AP) — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. today revealed new video and book-reading services that are designed for the iPad but bypass Apple Inc.'s fees on content sales.

Wal-Mart started to stream video from its Vudu service to the iPad's Web browser, and Amazon announced the Kindle Cloud Reader, which lets users read e-books.

Amazon, the leading seller of e-books, has a Kindle app for the iPad. However, Apple recently forced it to remove a button that launches Amazon's Kindle website, where users buy books. Apple wants companies to sell their content through its iTunes system, where it gets a 30 percent cut.

Media companies are finding Apple's fees hard to accept. So they are getting around that by avoiding apps that must be distributed through Apple's App Store, where Apple's fee policies apply. Earlier this summer, The Financial Times created an app-like website for its newspaper to avoid Apple's fees.

The Kindle Cloud Reader is a "Web app," nearly indistinguishable from a regular app. Users have to go through a few steps to store the app and their books on the iPad. But when that's done, it's capable of reading stored books without an Internet connection.