Here’s some irony for you. TheNextWeb reports that a coalition of nine well-known Chinese writers is suing Apple for 11.91 million yuan (US$1.88 million) for selling illegal e-books of their works on its App Store. The writers have asked Apple provide copyright certification of all works being sold on the App Store, but Apple has declined to do so. China, of course, is infamous as a hotbed of pirated and counterfeited goods, though it has been trying to change that image lately. It would appear from this story that Apple has been a bit lax in verifying ownership of...

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting article looking in some detail at exactly how Amazon has changed Android to form the basis of the Kindle Fire. I had been curious as to the nature of the changes, and this piece lays them out clearly as well as the reasoning behind them. The major change Amazon made was stripping a lot of stuff out of the operating system, the same way it stripped down the hardware. In fact, stripping down the hardware—leaving out things like the camera, accelerometer, or location services—is the major reason for what it pulled out of Android. Without...

Amazon issued a press release today touting the thousands of apps it will have available for its Kindle Fire. It name-dropped a number of popular apps that will be available through its app store, including “Netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, Facebook, The Weather Channel and popular games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap and Rovio.” It also pointed out that the apps will be 1-click purchasable, and have been tested for Kindle Fire compatibility. Most of the press release is made up of statements from the developers and publishers of the aforementioned apps talking about how awesome it...

It is not surprising that some of the more popular tablets have also proven to be some of the most restrictive. Jailbreaking the iPad is a popular pastime, of course, and one of the reasons the Nook has sold so well is that it has been so readily rootable, changing it from a relatively restricted color e-reader to a full-fledged, fully-functional Android tablet. Barnes & Noble has been notably hands-off in response to the rooting—unlike Apple, it has not engaged in an arms race to prevent it. And now it looks like Amazon is going to be following in...

Engadget has a couple of first looks at the new Kindle and Kindle Touch, including a video of the Touch in action (that doesn’t seem to be working at the time of this writing). As expected, the loss of the keyboard handicaps the basic Kindle slightly, as now any letter-based interactions have to be entered through an on-screen virtual keyboard. But on the other hand, for a “pure” e-reader, typing is only something you do occasionally anyway, so it may not be that much of a handicap in the long run. Certainly Kobo and Sony don’t seem to have found...

Just as Amazon did last year when it introduced the new third-generation Kindle, it is renaming its existing models and putting them on sale. The “Kindle Keyboard” and ”Kindle Keyboard 3G” have been marked down $15 to $99/$139 for the wifi-only version and $139/$189 for the 3G version (prices are with/without “special offers”). The wifi keyboard version is priced exactly the same as the new Touch wifi version, and the 3G keyboard version is only $10 less than the 3G Touch (or the same without ads). Given that you can order a $79 ad-supported Kindle right now, it’s...

Sometimes it seems Apple’s 30% royalty rate has become just one of those facts of life. Nobody has had much luck trying to talk Apple out of it; even companies as large as Amazon have ended up having to pull their in-app store links. But a consortium of French publications seem to expect they’ll have better luck. Reuters reports that eight such publications, ostensibly “fierce competitors” under normal circumstances, have put aside their differences and are trying to negotiate with Apple. The papers want a reduction in the 30% commission rate, and also access to customer data,...

Ars Technica reports Google is releasing a new version of the Android Market that will include support for renting movies and buying books. It is rolling out gradually to US Android device users, and will probably be included with Android Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of the OS to be released. The Ars piece reviews the usability of the app, which fixes some interface issues present in prior versions. There are a few minor glitches—in some cases it can be hard to tell whether items being promoted for sale are books or movies—but all in all it seems...

In reaction to Apple’s recent implementation of in-app store restrictions, Read Write Web reports, a number of e-reader developers have resorted to building HTML5 applications. These applications are essentially self-contained chunks of HTML code that can download themselves directly into your HTML5-capable device for offline use—and since they aren’t delivered through Apple’s app store, they can contain whatever in-app purchase options the developer wants. One such app is the Financial Times reader, which launched its HTML5 app last month. And today Kobo announced that it was developing an HTML5 e-reader in order to move toward being an “open...

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin has posted another opinion piece on his blog, in which he looks at the recent banishment of the Google Books app and Kobo’s in-app store as the latest in a series of business decisions affecting publishing that were outside publishing’s control. As he puts it in the headline, “publishing is living in a world not of its own making.” The point most emphatically made by all of this is that the book business is a cork floating on a digital device stream. We don’t control our environment. We must keep adapting to...

We’ve reported on Apple suing Amazon (and Amazon countersuing) for daring to use the term “app store” to describe the application store it is operating for Android devices, including tablets. (Recently, Apple suffered a setback when a judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction to keep Amazon from using the term.) It has also been quibbling with Microsoft over issues to trademark the term in the US. (It already holds it in Europe.) Now Apple has sent a cease-and-desist letter to free Java app repository GetJar, demanding that it stop calling itself “the world’s largest free app store.” GetJar...

CNet reports that the Borders iOS app has removed its e-bookstore browsing feature, in line with the dictates of Apple’s new policy on in-app purchases. However, unlike some of the apps I mentioned in my last post on this issue, Borders doesn’t tell people to go to Borders.com to buy e-books—it tells them to start using the Kobo app instead. The Kobo app still features an e-bookstore link a built-in e-bookstore, though undoubtedly its days are numbered given Apple’s moves to bring all content-based apps into compliance with its guidelines. Last month, we reported that Borders was shifting all...