As the antitrust trial against it gets underway, Apple continues to fight accusations that it engaged in collusion and price-fixing with the major e-book publishers — despite the overwhelming evidence that it did exactly that. Read more »
Ebook pricing strategies are changing fast as the market evolves and retailers and publishers amass more data. Here are some new tips. Read more »
Flipboard’s new curation tools for creating custom magazines may appeal to individual users, but they will likely also appeal to advertisers and other brands — and therein lies the potential for real media disruption. Read more »
Google is trying to paint a new German law regulating news excerpts as a victory, just as it did with the deals it cut with France and Belgium . But it feels like Google is losing more than it is winning. Read more »
So far, the only publisher participating is Hearst. There’s no set standard for how early a look each Newsstand issue will offer, Hearst told AllThingsD. Read more at GigaOM »
The government uses anti-trust law to stop cartels and ensure products can be bought and sold freely. This makes sense for ordinary consumer goods like gas or long distance phone calls, but does it make sense for cultural items like books? Read more »
After seven years of legal battles, Google has finally reached an agreement with American book publishers that will let it scan and digitize books. The deal stands to make things better for readers and publishers — although Amazon is probably not happy about it. Read more at GigaOM »
In a move aimed primarily at users of its textbooks, iPad publisher Inkling is making all of its titles available for the iPhone. The company’s interactive ebook publishing platform, Habitat, now works for iPhone as well. Read more »
The Department of Justice was supposed to publish all of the letters it has received about the ebook pricing settlement by June 25. Its failure to do so violates the Tunney Act, attorney Bob Kohn tells the judge presiding over the case in a letter. Read more »
Penny Arcade, a webcomic publisher and event producer, is trying to use Kickstarter to finance its web operations for a year so it can replace traditional banner advertising with a reader-centric model. Could traditional publishers learn something from this crowdfunding experiment? Read more at GigaOM »
According to Parse.ly CEO Sachin Kamdar, the problem with shares data is solvable. And as accurate social data becomes increasingly important, the first publisher to fully take advantage of this information will reap massive benefits and potentially reinvent how editorial decisions are made. Read more at GigaOM »
German e-reading service txtr hopes to take on Amazon and Apple by becoming the biggest provider of third party reading apps — and a deal with four major American publishers and a New York office could be the latest steps in that journey. Read more at GigaOM »
In the latest court filing in the ongoing Justice Department e-books price-fixing suit, Apple says it did not conspire to fix the prices of digital books to hurt competitors and its business strategy around pricing was “perfectly proper,” according to a Reuters report. Read more at GigaOM »
Book publishers are trying hard to argue that e-books cost almost as much to produce as printed ones, and therefore prices for e-books should be higher — but the bottom line is that consumers don’t care what a publisher’s costs are, nor should they. Read more at GigaOM »
Apple says it had to cut an agency-pricing deal with publishers in order to weaken Amazon’s monopolistic control over the e-book industry. But wait — didn’t Apple behave exactly the same way towards the record labels as it is accusing Amazon of behaving towards book publishers? Read more at GigaOM »
The Justice Department has at last filed an anti-trust complaint in New York against Apple and five publishers over an alleged price fixing conspiracy. Read more »
Anti-trust investigations are supposed to be tight-lipped affairs in which all sides lawyer up until the case settles or goes to trial. Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work at least. But in the case of book publishers and Apple, people are tossing legal duties to the wind in the hopes that press leaks will shape a settlement. Read more »
