US JUSTICE DEPARTMENT INVESTIGATING APPLE AND E-BOOK PUBLISHERS

Hot on the heels of the EU Commission, the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday confirmed that it is investigating the pricing of electronic books, the latest antitrust watchdog to probe whether there was improper collusion by Apple Inc. and publishers to prevent discounting.
At a congressional hearing, Sharis Pozen, the Justice Department's acting antitrust chief, said: "We are also investigating the electronic book industry, along with the European Commission and the states attorneys general."

The Wall Street Journal and other media have reported that the Justice Department has been investigating the matter since last year.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION INVESTIGATING APPLE AND E-BOOK PUBLISHERS FOR PRICE FIXING

The European Commission this morning announced that it has opened formal antitrust proceedings to investigate whether a number of international ebook publishers have engaged in anti-competitive practices affecting the sale of e-books in Europe, “possibly with the help of Apple.” According to the press release, the opening of proceedings means that the EC will “treat the case as a matter of priority”.

he Commission says it will, in particular, investigate whether the publishers and Apple have engaged in illegal agreements or practices that would “have the object or the effect of restricting competition” in the European Union or in the European Economic Area (EEA). The commission is also looking into “agency agreements” between the publishers and e-book retailers, in collaboration with the UK Office of Fair Trading.

The EC says it is concerned whether some of the publishers’ and Apple’s practices “may breach EU antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and restrictive business practices”. The opening of the proceedings follows unannounced inspections that were carried out by the Commission at the premises of several e-book publishers in March 2011.

AMAZON PRIME MEMBERS GET NEW LENDING LIBRARY

Amazon's home page has a new message for Prime members from CEO Jeff Bezos, indicating that their membership plan has a new bonus: free books. The Kindle Owners Lending Library service offers up to one book per month from a selection of thousands of titles, including "over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers" with no due dates. That's in addition to the free two-day shipping and access to TV shows and movies offered through Prime Instant Video as a part of the $79/year package.

AMAZON UNVEILS NEW TABLET AND TOUCHSCREEN E-READERS

Amazon this morning launched new touchscreen e-readers as well as the much talked about Kindle Fire tablet. The readers will use infrared touch, which puts an infrared touch screen over e-ink. The screens appear to be roughly the same size as the current crop of Kindle e-readers. The e-readers will come in three flavors, two having touchscreens. The 3G will be $149, the WiFi only will be $99 and the non-touch version will be $79. According to an Amazon rep these prices are for the ad supported versions and the Wifi only and non-touch version without ads will be $149 and $109 respectively.

In addition to the new e-readers, a software update was also announced. Some of the new features include X-ray, which allows users to quickly look up words, get character synopsis and location information directly from the ebook. WhisperSync was also beefed to make it quicker.

Finally, Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire. The Fire is Amazon's new 7" IPS touchscreen tablet that runs a customized version of the Android OS. It has a dual core processor, weighs 14.6 ounces and comes with free Amazon cloud storage. The browser for the Fire will be the Amazon Silk which is a new hybrid browser with part residing on the tablet and the other part on the cloud server. The Fire will retail for $199.

No mention was made on the rumored 10" tablet Amazon is expected to unveil sometime in the first quarter of 2012.

AMAZON REMOVING DUPLICATE eBOOKS

Under the idea of "private label rights," authors can do just that: sell their works to others who can rebrand and resell them. This week, Amazon cracked down on duplicate ebooks in its Kindle Store, pulling titles because they "diminish the experience for customers." One copycat who got the smack down called it a "kick in the pants" when his 22 titles got yanked. He did, however, admit he had the swift one coming. Aping authors can expect more book banning as Amazon continues to rid itself of "undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of e-books."

JESSE JACKSON JR. BLAMES iPAD FOR HIGH UNEMPLOYMENT

You know how ebooks are gradually taking over paper books as the most popular format for the consumption of the written word? Well, that's bad, mmkay? Publishers, librarians, and booksellers are losing their jobs and It's all entirely the iPad's fault. Forget the Kindle's millions of sales, the iPad did it. In a technophobic rant to rival all technophobic rants that have come before it, Illinois Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. accuses the iPad's popularity for the current level of unemployment in his nation, before proceeding to sculpt a rickety argument about how the First Amendment to the US Constitution is being exploited for the benefit of China. Check out the spectacle for yourself:

eBOOK SALES JUMP IN JANUARY; PAPERBOOK SALES SLIDE

The Association of American Publishers said Thursday that eBook sales for the month of January were up 115% from the same period last year. No surprise there, given that you can read them on most any mobile device these days, not just eReaders. Net sales of eBooks were $69.9 million during the month, up from $32.4 million in January 2010.

On the other side of the coin, sales of paperback books were down 30% year-over-year, and sales of adult hardcover books dropped to $49.1 million in January 2011 from $55.4 million during January 2010.

It doesn’t look like overpriced textbooks are going anywhere, as the higher education sector wasn’t hit as hard. Higher education sales were $382 million this January, down from $387.6 million reported in the same month in 2010.

ANDROID MARKET ADDS EBOOKS; MOVIES & MUSIC TO COME

Google's Android market has gone live with the URL http://market.android.com/books/. Users can purchase ebooks directly from the Android market and have them delivered to their handset wirelessly.

There are two additional URL's that Google has not gone live with yet...http://market.android.com/movies/ and http://market.android.com/music. This should make those that were disappointed that a music service was not announced at the recent Honeycomb event. No timing on when these additional two services will launch, but we speculate Google is still in negotiations with the content providers. Once agreements have been reached, Google is sure to make them active.

SONY READER APP LAUNCHES ON ANDROID

The Sony Reader app for Android, promised for December 2010 release, has finally appeared in the Android Marketplace. The app allows users, besides reading ebooks, to automatically syncs previously purchased books, and like the e-readers, it also supports ePub and PDF formats. In addition, you can easily highlight text and adjust font and brightness settings right from the page you're reading.

Sony has confirmed the app will only work with handsets that run Android 2.2 and higher, which is incredibly ironic considering most Sony Ericsson handsets are, you know, still stuck with 2.1.

The iPhone version, according to Sony, is in review by Apple and should be in the App Store soon.

KINDLE EBOOK LENDING CLUB LAUNCHED

A new startup called the Kindle Lending Club has launched in beta this week, aiming to make it easier for Kindle users to take advantage of the new options to loan and borrow their e-books.

The Kindle Lending Club is the brainchild of Catherine MacDonald, who said that when she heard Amazon announce on December 30 that it was finally adding a lending option for Kindle, she decided to set up a Facebook group - a way to help people find others who were willing to share their e-books. But as interesting in the group exploded, MacDonald realized that Facebook just didn't offer the scalability needed for such an undertaking. "I had no idea how viral the idea was," she says.

So in less than two weeks' time, she has pulled together the resources - about $12,500 in angel investment and a Web development team - to launch the Kindle Lending Club.

MacDonald's background is in project management, something evident in the speed and decisiveness with which she's moved forward to launch this startup. But as she notes, there is a huge interest among Kindle users in this sort of undertaking, and the 4800-some-odd members of the Facebook group have given her a great place to work on the customer development and to build a product with avid Kindle readers in mind.

Both sharing and borrowing is free through the Kindle Lending Club. You can browse for the titles that other users have made available, and you can make available the books you're willing to lend. The site simply matches borrowers and lenders. The rest of the Kindle lending rules stay in place: the loan is for 14 days. You can't read a title while it's on loan to someone else. And you can only loan a title once.

It's up to publishers to decide whether or not their titles can be available for lending (and none of the books in my Kindle library are eligible, if that's any indication of how publishers have decided). Nonetheless, even though the selection of books to lend may be limited, this doesn't seem to have dampened the interest and excitement in lending and borrowing.

Since the public beta opened on Friday, 786 users have joined the Kindle Lending Club and they've listed almost 2000 books that they're willing to offer to loan. 669 borrow requests have been made and 286 e-books have been loaned.

That it took almost three years for the Kindle to add a lending option is an indication of the reluctance of Amazon - or more accurately, perhaps, publishers - to allow lending. Some have argued that loosening restrictions around the transfer of digital copies will mean a loss of book sales; but it isn't really clear that that's always the case. As people run out of time to finish a book they've borrowed or as they grow tired of waiting in line for the next available copy of a popular book, they might just opt to purchase it. That's what MacDonald hopes, in fact, as she's an Amazon Affiliate member and that program - a cut of the Amazon sales generated via links on the Kindle Lending Club site - is where the startup will get its revenue.

MacDonald says she hasn't heard anything from Amazon in response to the startup.
But the excitement it's generated from Kindle users - their willingness to share their books - points to a "renaissance of reading," argues MacDonald. And it would be a shame for Amazon to put an end to that. [ReadWriteWeb]

BARNES AND NOBLE CHARGES FOR FREE PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS TOO

A few days ago we reported that Amazon was charging for ebooks that were free and in the public domain. They booksellers on Amazon got the ebooks from Project Gutenberg, stripping out their headers and code and formating them per Amazon guidelines. The sellers would then post them for sale on Amazon's website, essentially making money off Project Gutenberg volunteer's hard work. It is not illegal, but it does bring up some serious ethical questions.

Now, we have learned that sellers on Barnes and Noble's bookstore are doing the same thing. It was discovered that multiple sellers have Charles Dickens' classic A Tale of Two Cities for sale. This classic is in the public domain and can be obtained for free at numerous sites around the internet. [BGR]

GOOGLE EDITIONS LAUNCHING IN DECEMBER IN US

Google Editions, Google's online ebookstore, will launch by the end of the year in the US. Google Editions has been described as a web-centric, buy-anywhere, read-anywhere platform, one that eschews the proprietary hardware and software model currently championed by the likes of Amazon for a more ubiquitous and accessible one. Retail pricing won't differ, we're told, from what Amazon and Barnes & Noble currently charge.

Small websites of all creeds, whether they be independent bookstores or book reviewers, will be encouraged to participate by linking their users to Google Editions of whatever scriptures they're discussing -- with an unannounced revenue sharing model. [Engadget]

AMAZON SELLERS CHARGING FOR FREE PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS

A report in Tuesday’s Washington Post reveals that Amazon is apparently selling free public-domain eBooks that have had their license information stripped. The eBooks in question originate from Project Gutenberg and are available there for free in a variety of formats including ePub, HTML and Kindle.

Project Gutenberg was founded by eBook inventor Michael Hart and is known as the first generally available collection of free eBooks. It is also maintained by volunteers who are not paid for their services.

Amazon’s alleged practice of selling rebranded Gutenberg eBooks is not illegal — in fact it doesn’t even violate Project Gutenberg’s license terms. It is, however, unethical at best and very disturbing at worst. In response to inquiries, an Amazon spokeswoman told the Post, “These books were uploaded by a third party using our self-service platform. I’ve sent your note to the appropriate team internally.” Amazon did not state that the Gutenberg eBooks would be removed from its Kindle store, nor did it condemn the practice of selling reformatted versions of free public-domain eBook files. [BGR]

NEW YORK TIMES TO PUBLISH BESTSELLER EBOOK LIST

The New York Times has officially announced it will begin to publish a bestseller list for e-books in early 2011. The current NYT bestseller lists -- which are divided into several categories -- are considered by many to be the definitive metric for a book's success. The Times will have two separate lists covering fiction and non-fiction when it launches, drawing on information from various retailers, and will be independently verified by third party company RoyaltyShare. The list will appear in both the print and online editions of the paper. [Engadget]

AMAZON BRINING KINDLE TO WINDOWS PHONE 7

Amazon isn't satisfied with having its own ereader or just having apps on a few devices, they aim to take over the ebook/ereader world.  Amazon has just announced they will make their Kindle app available for Windows Phone 7 devices "in the coming months".  This brings the worlds largest ebook retailer onto the new Microsoft platform. [Engadget]

Kindle for Windows Phone 7