A month and a half since Baen made the jump to Amazon availability, the publisher is about to add another feather to its cap. On her forum on the Baen Bar, publisher Toni Weisskopf has mentioned that Baen e-books will soon be available DRM-free in Apple’s iBooks store. A formal announcement will be made when the exact timeframe has been nailed down. As with the current Amazon deal, EARCs and monthly discount bundles will continue to be exclusive to Baen. The time since the program happened has seen some minor controversy erupt on the Baen Bar. After December 15th,...

It's that time of year! Everyone from fellow bloggers to publishers themselves are coming out with predictions for what the coming year will bring the e-book world. So what do we at TeleRead predict? Here are some trends to keep an eye on. 1. The international market will rise significantly Amazon and Barnes & Noble may dominate the U.S. market, but Kobo is the market share leader in Canada, and is gaining ground in other markets where it is partnering with major retail chains and often being the first on the scene. Amazon is taking notice and beginning to localize its popular Kindle store. First,...

Do publishers deserve special treatment from anti-trust courts? Paid Content reports on antitrust experts who said no at a New York book event this week: “There’s never been a defendant sued for antitrust who didn’t think their market was special,” said Chris Sagers of Cleveland State University, adding that “agency pricing”  (a commission-style pricing system used by the publishers to check Amazon) is just another word for price-fixing. This is basically in line with the arguments the Department of Justice made in its response to public comments, and its arguments in the hearings concerning whether the proposed settlement should go through; Judge Denise...

I’m a little late, but I wanted to bring up just one story that popped up between the times I was at The Digital Reader and here. I’ve been following the saga of RoyaltyShare founder Bob Kohn at length with some interest and more than a little amusement. (That's Kohn in the photo to the right.)  Though he doesn’t necessary have a direct stake in the case’s outcome, Kohn has nonetheless been filing verbose comments, legal motions, and even a comic book (as a legal motion) in an attempt to head off the Department of Justice’s proposed agency pricing settlement....

J.K. Rowling's first adult novel hit stores (and e-book readers) today, and almost immediately, the lukewarm reviews trickled in—not for the content of the book itself, but for the Kindle formatting: a glitch on the tech end (which this article attributes to an unspecified 'issue' on the end of Hachette, the publisher) made it impossible for Kindle readers to adjust the font size to their preference. You had to read it in either Really Big or Teeny Tiny, with no in between. Curiously mixed in with these complaints was an outcry over the e-book price: $17.99, based on a discount off the...

Well, that didn’t take long. In the wake of the Department of Justice’s response to the hundreds of comments it received regarding its proposed anti-trust settlement with three alleged agency pricing conspirator publishers, PaidContent reports that the American Booksellers Association and Barnes & Noble have sought permission from Judge Denise Cote to file an amicus curae (“friend of the court”) brief in the case. Judge Cote has granted permission to file such a brief by August 15th. The ABA and B&N discuss the sorts of things they’re likely to say in the 10-page filing (PDF) in which they...

If you’re interested in any new tidbit of information about the legal matters surrounding the publishers’ and Apple’s implementation of agency pricing, here’s an interesting one for you. Publishers Weekly reports that Denise Cote, the judge in the class-action suit against Apple and the publishers, has ruled that Walter Isaacson, the the author of the Steve Jobs biography, does not have to divulge unpublished notes and interview materials to the law firm serving as the plaintiffs in the case. The law firm wanted to see the notes to pick them over for anything that would lend support to the...

Was agency pricing hugely beneficial to self-publishers? In a response to a DoJ public comment by David Gaughran (claiming that professional publishers did it to try to kill off Amazon’s self-publishing), self-publishing blogger Aaron Shepard makes a pretty convincing argument that it amounted to a great big sloppy kiss from publishers, who were unwittingly handicapping themselves in competing against self-publishers’ lower prices—and that Amazon isn’t necessarily as big a friend to self-publishers as they might believe. Here are only a couple of his numerous points: • The agency model helped self publishers by creating a...

Publishing industry consultant Mike Shatzkin has posted a look on his blog at what the settlement terms could mean for the near future of publishing as the publishers who’ve settled put the required contract changes into effect. Assuming things move forward at all speed, the terms could be in effect as soon as mid-September, well in time for the holiday season. Although Shatzkin was a fairly vocal critic of the settlement in past columns, he doesn’t waste any time complaining about the DoJ’s decision to let it remain unchanged. Instead, he talks about the business models publishers might consider...

Today the Department of Justice finally got around to posting over 850 comments it received on its proposed anti-trust settlement with three agency pricing publishers—along with its own response (PDF) to the concerns and issues raised by the comments it received. In summary, the Department of Justice considered all the relevant issues raised by the comments, pro and con, and found nothing sufficient to convince it to budge one iota from the settlement plans it had drawn up. Of those comments, fewer than 70 were in support of the settlement, and the rest were opposed. (However, hundreds of those...

The Justice Department suit against the publishers and Apple for introducing agency pricing is not seeking damages—just a change in the way publishers price. However, the competing class-action lawsuits filed by various law firms and a number of state attorney generals are seeking damages, and therein lies a bit of a snarl-up. PaidContent has an interesting article looking at the matter at great length. The publishers who settled with the DoJ have also been settling with states to the tune of millions of dollars, and this creates a problem for the lawyers who filed the non-state-related class action firms—the...

Senator Charles Schumer (D, New York) has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal calling upon the Department of Justice to drop its lawsuit against the agency price publishers and Apple. Schumer seems to have bought into the Author’s Guild’s rationale, which he quotes and references, painting Amazon as the evil monopolist and publishers as beleaguered innovators who came up with a way to nobble Amazon’s unfair advantage and are now being punished for it. The suit, Schumer writes, “could wipe out the publishing industry as we know it, making it much harder for young authors to get...