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Monday, 16 April 2012

News: DoJ vs Apple, And The Myracle Of Challenged Books

The earth shifted a little last week. So did the publishing landscape, when the United States' Department of Justice filed a suit against Apple and several publishers for allegedly fixing prices of e-books.

Many see these publisher's acceptance of the agency model suggested by Apple as a response to what is seen as Amazon's growing dominance over the publishing industry. Some believe that Amazon will emerge as the big winner in the clash, as fears of authors and smaller independent publishers getting trampled in the middle grow. This view appears to be more prevalent in this debate on The Huffington Post.

Online publisher Smashwords, however, will keep its agency pricing model, despite the DoJ's looming showdown with Apple. Helps when some of its books are less than US$3 and almost 15,000 of them are free....

Too much has been written about this over the week since the news broke, so I won't elaborate further. I'll say this though: E-book retailers should make it much easier for Malaysians to buy e-books, if they're concerned about piracy and stuff. And e-readers need to be cheaper. Then, perhaps, they can start talking about e-book prices.


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