From The Verge:

Amazon has opened pre-orders for its Kindle Fire tablets in over 170 countries and expanded its Android Appstore in nearly 200 regions . It’s the biggest device rollout the company has embarked on since it entered the tablet market, and sees it take on Apple in terms of availability and distribution. Before today, the Kindle Fire was available in only seven countries — including the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

. . . .

Selling its Kindle Fire models at low margins, Amazon’s tablets have consistently topped the charts as its most popular product. Amazon is clearly looking to compete with Apple on price and availability, with a lock in to its broad ecosystem.

Link to the rest at The Verge

From Cult of Mac:

Penguin announced this morning that the company has reached an agreement with the US State Attorneys General to pay $75 million as a settlement for the eBook price fixing claims that have been launched against Apple’s iBookstore.

Link to the rest at Cult of Mac

From The Digital Reader:

Apple has a long history of censoring the more risque content from ebooks sold in iBooks and iTunes, even going so far as to threaten developers like Izneo with banishment, but today they have taken it to a new level. Several newspapers including De Standaard are reporting that Apple has rejected De Hartsvriendin, Heleen van Royen’s latest book, because of 2 links found in chapter 22.

Yes, links.

Apparently Apple has moved beyond censoring content they don’t approve of. Now they are blocking the sale of ebooks that merely link to content that Apple doesn’t approve of. Admittedly, the links lead to a couple porn sites , but that doesn’t change the fact that Apple is once again banning an ebook because of links.

Link to the rest at The Digital Reader

PG is of two minds about this.

On the one hand, for ebook innovation, links would be an obvious tool, albeit one that would work much better with tablets than with e-ink readers.  It’s still early days for tablet technology and lots of cool new capabilities that authors might want to use will be appearing in the future.

On the other hand, if parents discovered links to porn sites in a children’s picture book, Apple would feel an enormous backlash and sales of children’s ebooks everywhere would plunge.

Before you say this would never happen, PG’s theory about the Internet is that, if it is possible, it will happen some day.

Books tend to have much longer lives than other Internet content. The links that go to perfectly benign locations in year one may go to somewhere entirely different in year five after the owner of the domain has let its registration lapse and someone else buys the domain name.

This very thing happened to a website that PG formerly visited on a regular basis. Apparently, a large porn video operation vacuums up discarded domain names that have had a reasonable number of visitors in the past.

From All Things D:

The United States Department of Justice has described Apple’s defense against allegations that it conspired to illegally fix e-book prices “unconvincing” and “untethered from both precedent and logic.”

Evidently, Apple feels much the same way about the DOJ’s charges.

In an 81-page April 26 filing that was made public today, Apple pointedly denied federal prosecutors’ accusations, saying the discussions they’ve painted as collusion were simply tough business negotiations and that their end result — an “agency” e-book pricing model where publishers, not retailers, set prices — made the e-book market more competitive, not less.

“Apple did not conspire to fix e-book prices,” the company said in its filing. “The evidence proves that Apple acted independently, to further its own legitimate business goals, in negotiating agency agreements with the publishers to enter the e-book market.”

. . . .

“Amazon at the time sold 9 out of every 10 e-books, and many publishers publicly disagreed with Amazon’s uniform, below-cost pricing strategy for New York Times bestsellers,” Apple said in its filing. “This tumult in the industry inspired the second largest e-retailer, Barnes & Noble, to push for agency agreements with the publishers. And Amazon used an agency-like model for small publishers and self-published authors. In other words, Apple did not introduce agency to the e-book industry; it was simply the first to reach an agency agreement with the industry’s largest publishers.”

And for a new entrant to the e-book market, as Apple was at the time, the agency model was a logical one. The company was looking for a 30 percent commission on every sale; it was hardly going to get that from publishers at the $9.99 price point Amazon had established.

Which is not to say that it was opposed to $9.99. According to its filing, it wasn’t. As long as it was able to collect that 30 percent commission, Apple said it didn’t particularly care what price publishers sold their books at. Yes, it required a “Most Favored Nation” agreement from publishers that gave it the right to lower prices to match low prices offered by competing retailers, but it argues it did this to remain competitive with Amazon, not to influence its business model.

. . . .

And the company insists the facts are on its side:

Average prices for trade e-books have fallen, and output, whether measured in the number of sales, the number of titles, or the types and quality of e-books offered, has increased substantially. These facts are undisputed.

Apple also fundamentally transformed the e-reading experience, leaving rudimentary, black-and-white, and expensive single-purpose e-readers (e.g., the Kindle) in the dust. The e-book world changed dramatically when Apple launched its iBookstore on the iPad in April 2010. At the time, 400,000 e-book titles were available to the consuming public; today, readers can download more than 1.7 million e-books. Apple has also created or spurred a number of the most important e-reading hardware and software innovations, such as full-color, interactive, and vivid digital e-books.

The bottom line, said attorney Orin Snyder of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, is that “Apple should be commended, not sued. Apple injected much-needed competition and innovation into the eBook business. … The DOJ’s case is based on fictions and incomplete quotations. The actual evidence proves that Apple did not conspire to fix prices in the eBook business. We look forward to trial.”

Link to the rest at All Things D

From BGR:

European governments are casting a baleful eye on the explosive smartphone and tablet growth. The problem for many Europeans lies in the way these devices promote vehicles for American entertainment — from Amazon and Netflix to Apple and Disney. The new proposalmade by the president of France would slap a 1% tax on all smartphone and tablet retail sales, with a goal to protect “l’exception culturelle”. This exception is a concept France created in 1992 to defend protectionist measures aimed at preserving the cultural heritage of France.

Sweden is taking a different tack; it has already extended its annual, $320 television tax to encompass consumers who do not own a television, but possess a smartphone or a tablet.

. . . .

Both the French and the Swedish policies are underpinned by fear. There is a new horror of cultural imperialism pervading Europe: Netflix is expanding aggressively, Amazon is on a rampage, iTunes is bringing a wide selection of American television and film content to the heartlands of the European Union. In many European countries, the limited selection of American entertainment content by national broadcasters used to cap the amount of American entertainment consumed by innocent Europeans.

Link to the rest at BGR

From Cult of Mac:

US authorities have called Apple out for collusion with electronic book publishers, saying that the Cupertino-based company conspired with publishers to raise eBook prices when negotiating iBooks by playing them all against each other and against rival eBook retailer, Amazon.

. . . .

Apple’s filing, released today but dated April 26, says that the major publishers were battling Amazon over the Mountain View-based retailer’s practice of selling eBooks at a much lower price than the publishers wanted. Apple claims that the publishers had already decided to stop Amazon by eliminating wholesale discounts on eBooks and to sell hardcover books in physical book stores first (a practice called windowing).

According to the filing, when Apple approached publishers to set up what would eventually become iBooks, the publishers weren’t pleased with terms that included a 30 percent commission, a guarantee of not underselling Apple, and that publishers stop windowing. Each publisher, says Apple, had a different counterproposal.

“Early — and constant — points of negotiation and contention were over Apple’s price caps and 30 percent commission. After Apple sent draft agency agreements to each publisher CEO on January 11, each immediately opposed Apple’s price tiers and caps,” Apple said in an proposed filing with the court, a document that runs to 81 pages.

Link to the rest at Cult of Mac and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From The New York Times:

The e-mail, from Steve Jobs of Apple to James Murdoch of News Corporation, reads as if one old sport were trying to cajole another into joining a caper: “Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99.”

According to the Justice Department, that e-mail is part of the evidence that Apple was the “ringmaster” in a price-fixing conspiracy in the market for e-books, a more direct leadership role than originally portrayed in the department’s April 2012 antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five publishing companies.

In its suit, the government said that Apple and the publishers conspired to fix e-book prices as part of a scheme to force Amazon to raise its e-book price from a uniform $9.99 to the higher level noted by Mr. Jobs in the e-mail, which publishers wanted. That, the department said, resulted in higher prices to consumers and ill-gotten profits for Apple and its partners.

. . . .

Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple, said the company did not conspire to fix prices on e-books.

“We helped transform the e-book market with the introduction of the iBookstore in 2010, bringing consumers an expanded selection of e-books and delivering innovative new features,” Mr. Neumayr said. “The market has been thriving and innovating since Apple’s entry, and we look forward to going to trial to defend ourselves and move forward.”

. . . .

In July 2010, Mr. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, told the chief executive of Random House, Markus Dohle, that the publisher would suffer a loss of support from Apple if it held out much longer, according to an account of the conversation provided by Mr. Dohle in the filing. Two months later, Apple threatened to block an e-book application by Random House from appearing in Apple’s App Store because it had not agreed to a deal with Apple, the filing said.

After Random House finally agreed to a contract on Jan. 18, 2011, Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of its e-books deals, sent an e-mail to Mr. Jobs attributing the publisher’s capitulation, in part, to “the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store,” the filing reads.

The newly released documents also quote David Shanks, chief executive of Penguin, as saying that Apple was the “facilitator and go-between” for the publishing companies in arranging the agreement.

Link to the rest at The New York Times and thanks to Matthew for the tip.

All the big publishers who were included in this suit have settled. It is not unusual for one of the conditions of settlement to include an obligation to assist the Justice Department in pursuing its suit against the remaining defendants.

It looks like the publishers are keeping their end of the bargain.

From The Bookseller:

A new Kindle app from Amazon will help blind and partially sighted people to access 1.5m titles.

The app works with the in-built magnification and speech functions of iPhones, iPads and some other Apple devices, while also creating an electronic Braille display.

. . . .

Fazilet Hadi, the director of inclusivity at the RNIB, said: “This fantastic breakthrough from Amazon means that people with sight loss can now read the 1.5m titles in the Kindle store. RNIB helped Amazon by getting feedback from blind and partially sighted people who tested early versions of the app.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller and thanks to Diana for the tip.

From TechRadar.Tablets:

The iPad’s share of the UK tablet market has fallen from 73 per cent to 63 per cent in the last twelve months, according to figures published by YouGov.

The Tablet Tracker show a leap in the ownership of Android tablets, mainly through the cheaper Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire, while Samsung also made significant gains at the end of Q1 2013.

The Google Nexus 7, which went on sale for just £159 last year, has amassed 8 per cent of the total UK market, while Amazon’s cheap Android tablets accounted for 5 per cent of all sales.

Meanwhile, Samsung jumped from a 4 per cent to a 10 per cent share.

. . . .

The YouGov report says the fall of Apple’s tablet overlordship comes despite the launch of the iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad at the back end of last year.

Link to the rest at TechRadar.Tablets

From The Digital Reader:

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple since he took over the reins from Steve Jobs in 2011 is now going to be required to sit for a deposition. The US govt wants to question Tim Cook for information on Apple’s role in the conspiracy to bring about Agency eBook Pricing.

Apple had tried to fight the request with the argument that it would “cumulative and duplicative” since 11 other Apple executives had already been questioned. Unfortunately for Apple that argument did not hold water.

Link to the rest at The Digital Reader

Apple fanbois and fangurlz will be aflame with indignation, but remember that the alleged actions of Apple, already admitted by five other co-conspirators, stole millions of dollars from readers through artificially high ebook prices.