That’s the provocative theory put forward by Sue Zoldak in an opinion piece on The Daily Caller blog. She starts out by noting that in some cases hardcover prices are lower than e-book prices (something I’ve mentioned before myself), and points out that—unlike the iTunes deal that lowered the price of music when sold digitally—Jobs used publishers’ fears of Amazon to negotiate a rise in e-book prices. This came at the expense of Amazon, who was using exactly the same model to sell Kindles that Jobs had used to sell iPods. The real question...

I hadn’t been paying much attention to the court ruling issued in the case of white rapper Eminem suing his record labels for more money. But then I saw this piece in Techdirt about it, and had to reconsider. It may not have direct implications for e-books specifically, but it definitely has larger implications for digital media as a whole. Eminem’s producers sued the Universal subsidiary that was handling his music for a greater share of royalties. The rationale was that music sales generate a much lower rate of royalties than music licenses (for use in TV shows, commercials,...

How can music be more like e-books? Well, if the rumors are true, Apple is in the process of negotiating to patch one of the biggest differences between the iTunes music store and the way most vendors treat e-books (not to mention the iPhone/iPad app store): Bloomberg cites anonymous sources who claim Apple is in talks with the Big Four music labels to allow unlimited re-downloading of purchased music. In my tech support job, I’ve had to deal with a number of people who re-synced their iPods with a different computer after a hard-drive crash, thinking it would copy...

The jailbreak wars continue. Last week, users found that a recent iBooks update had the undocumented side-effect of failing to open DRM-protected e-books on jailbroken iOS devices. ReadWriteWeb presumed this was Apple’s way of trying to protect its DRM from being broken and unprotected e-books subsequently exported. However, the jailbreakers have struck back. ReadWriteWeb now reports that the developers of the jailbreak Sn0wbreeze have released a new version that supposedly fixes iBooks “100%” (though some users have still reported trouble with it). As always, if you jailbreak your device, you do so at your own risk. I’m...

Publishers Weekly has an overview report, with the above name, on the iBookstore and its place in the market. Here's a snippet: Not everyone is embracing the iBookstore, though. At this time Oceanhouse Media -- the leading publisher of children's digital book apps on Apple’s App Store, with the exclusive right to make apps of Dr. Seuss’s work -- is not planning to sell there. “We believe that in order to have an effective digital children’s book you need a level of interactivity that cannot be provided for with iBooks,” says Oceanhouse Media president Michel Kripalani. “Only apps can deliver...

Received the following email from Signe Nichols: Hello Paul, I am a fan of your TeleReads. Thanks for the great info. I was in the apple iTunes Producer which is the program used to upload new and edit existing books for the iBookstore (which I am sure you know) and there was a message in the back office saying (paraphrased): The iTunes producer would be down and offline from November 23 until December 22 and that new books would not be able to be uploaded during this time and any changes or books in pending status could not be changed. ...

I just updated my iPhone and found that all of my music was missing after the update completed. In fact, this is not the case. Checking around the web I see that this is a bug in the latest update. The way to cure it is simply to do a sync with iTunes and after the sync everything will re-appear. The music was not ever deleted, it just seems that the iPhone needs to be re-authorized with iTunes. After I did a sync all my music re-appeared....

Engadget reports that iOS 4.2 for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad will become available for download this Friday, to be preceded by the release of iTunes 10.1 on Thursday (or, according to Redmond Pie, today). As we’ve previously reported, iOS 4.2 is going to include a number of advances, most notably adding multitasking, folders, game center, etc. to the iPad, but it will also redefine the iPad’s “orientation lock” switch to a mute switch (with no way for users to change it back). One of the features touted for the new iOS was “AirPrint”, the...

“I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.” —Darth Vader, The Empire Strikes Back Remember how all but one of the “big six” print publishers were so quick to hop into bed with Apple and its agency pricing scheme, out of fear that Amazon would sooner or later unilaterally dictate pricing terms to those publishers from its position of marketing strength, that they actually slashed their own e-book revenue to do it? Publishing executives must surely be starting to feel that twinge of regret that comes from waking up with a stranger by...

Got the following email from Frank Lowney that I thought I should pass on to you: I thought that other Teleread subscribers might be interested in Apple’s not yet widely publicized announcement that the iTunes U service (free to higher education) now supports .epub files which nicely complements the way the iTunes.app supports .epub in RSS feeds. I’ve written two posts to my blog that you may want to draw from should you choose to write this up: Announcement: http://frank-lowney.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-support-for-epub-in-itunes-u.html More Details: http://frank-lowney.blogspot.com/2010/10/more-details-on-itunes-u-support-for.html What is iTunes U? --> http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/ For academic types, this is a major development. Of course there is...

On our sister blog Appletell, Bill Stiteler writes about the contortions he had to go through to get a DRM-restricted Overdrive audiobook from his local public library onto his iPod. It turned into a time-consuming process that took far longer than should be necessary for something as simple as checking out a library book. (We covered a webcomic’s look at library audiobook DRM back in March.) Even though the Overdrive Media Console is available for both Mac and PC, only some of its content can be downloaded through the Mac version. Stiteler had to boot into Windows (and...

By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor iOS 4 -- which powers the iPad, the iPhone 4, and the iPhone 3GS (for those who have upgraded) – along with iTunes 10 (actually since version 9.2) means iTunes is now able to manage ebooks for use with Apple’s iBooks app. Having spent some time messing around with this, I figured it was worth passing along what I’ve learned. When you open iTunes, you’ll see a Books library in the program’s sidebar, with a little book icon off the to the left. (If you don’t see this, go...