June 13, 2013: Eddy Cue takes the witness stand to defend Cupertino’s business strategy in the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Apple regarding e-book pricing in the iBooks Store.
Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of internet software and services, is the Apple exec in charge of the iBooks initiative. His testimony proves vital to a case in which potential damages climb well into the nine figures.
Bringing an end to Apple’s long-running iBooks price fixing scandal, affected customers will today receive their settlement payment for books bought between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012.
Settlements work out at $1.57 for the majority of e-books, increasing to $6.93 for New York Times bestsellers. Publishers involved in the suit include the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster — all of whom were found guilty of colluding with Apple to fix e-book prices.
The ongoing iBooks antitrust case between Apple and the United States Department of Justice took a very interesting twist this morning when the DoJ and 33 state Attorneys General laid out plans to remedy Apple’s wrongdoings and restore competition to the market.
The DoJ wants Apple to terminate all of its deals with book publishers, and refrain from entering into any new ones for at least five years. It also wants the company to start selling e-books from rivals like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Did Apple conspire with major publishers to increase e-book prices? The European Commission has launched an antitrust probe of Apple and five publishers amid claims the industry was “terrified” by Amazon’s $9.99 e-book push. At the heart is Apple’s iBookstore and the tech giant’s “agency model” that a California lawsuit charges inflated book prices.
Following this morning’s new that the authorized biography of Steve Jobs had rocketed up the Amazon book charts, its publishers, Simon & Schuster, have announced that the title’s release date has been brought forward to October 24.
Simon & Schuster announced on Sunday that the authorized biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been scheduled for an early 2012 release. The book entitled iSteve: The Book of Jobs is being written by Walter Isaacson, who has been working on the biography since 2009 and has enjoyed rare and exclusive interviews with Jobs, members of his family, and his colleagues at Apple.
