Everything ibooks
17 more American states have joined the class action lawsuit against Apple and publishers for e-book pricing collusion according to amended court documents. The new docs also revealed an e-mail from the late Steve Jobs describing how he saw the situation to the parent company of one of the conspiring publishers.
Looking for great free reading apps for your iPad? The App Store is home to over half a million apps and games, and a surprising number of them are available for free. Some of the most popular free apps are free reading apps. We're talking ebooks, comic books, web articles, and more. So start reading, and then start downloading!
The standing committee on infrastructure and communications in the Australian House of Representatives will be launching an investigation into why digital goods (such as iTunes music and iBooks) are priced so much more highly in Australia than elsewhere in the world. Traditionally, shipping costs drove prices up for physical goods, but for electronic files you're downloading, there's really no good reason for such a price disparity.
Apple Senior Vice President of Internet Services, Eddy Cue bluntly commented on the iBooks pricing model and its legal quagmire, saying "We can't treat newspapers or magazines any differently than we treat FarmVille."
Absent any actual federal action to glom onto, Canadian media decided to get in on the Apple iBook price-fixing headline game in a more creative, almost desperate way.
Everything you need to know about re-downloading apps, games, iBooks, music, TV shows, and movies from the iTunes Store and iCloud
iTunes in the Cloud lets you access content you've bought from Apple's iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore, re-download it to your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and to iTunes on your Mac or Windows PC, and stream your music, movies, and TV shows to your Apple TV.
Apple has officially responded to Department of Justice (DOJ) charges, which allege Apple conspired with publishers to force an agency pricing model that ultimately makes e-books more expensive for consumers.
Apple, Penguin, and Macmillan haven't shown any signs of settling with the Department of Justice over charges of e-book pricing collusion issued yesterday, sources say. However, the other publishers in the suit, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster, are likely to settle before the investigation goes any further.
The U.S. Justice Department has just slapped Apple and their various publishing partners, like HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Penguin, with chrages of e-book pricing collusion. Sources say that HarperCollins is in a hurry to get the issue settled as soon as today, but Penguin was ready to put up a fight in court.
Under the traditional book-selling model, retailers like B&N, Amazon, and others could get 50% or more of the revenue from the sale of a book. Under Apple's "agency model", they get 30%. The traditional model is retailer-centric. Apple's model is publisher-centric.
This upsets the US Justice Department. Under the old model, the retailer set the price and so could sell the book at any price they wanted, even at a loss. Under Apple's model, the publisher sets the price, so there's no retailer discount.
