Another ruling from a European court on the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuits over the Galaxy Tab’s design has come in, and it doesn’t bode well for Apple. An appeals court in The Hague, Netherlands dismissed Apple’s patent-infringement attempt to get the Galaxy Tab banned from sale in the country, following up on Apple’s appeal after a lower court’s similar decision in August. The court made its decision based on at least two pieces of prior art for each of Apple’s claims, determining that Apple’s claims were therefore narrow enough that they had not been infringed. Next week, a German...

From the Good E-Reader blog: Bas Group features one of the best online precenses in The Netherlands and controls the chains Dixons, PC World and Dynabyte. It is obvious the company is leading the charge of retail and online technology and gadgets in that country. The acquisition of Bebook and Endless Ideas will bolster their portfolio and allow them a higher profit margin at selling the e-readers in their retail locations. According to Steven Baker, CEO of BAS Group, “we are proud to be a Dutch brand with an excellent reputation in the e-reader market to our business portfolio to add....

From the Dutch eReaders site, here is a Google translation of the article: Endless Ideas, the Dutch manufacturer of the BeBook eReader and tablet, is bankrupt. The company came in 2008 on the market with a 6 "eInk reader called BeBook. Later the company introduced with WiFi connectivity and also ereaders BeBook live, a tablet that went on sale in early 2011.Utrecht The company was experiencing rapid development, not only in Netherlands but also across the borders. This was partly due to collaborations with bookshops and electronics chains and largemarketing campaigns.The first BeBook, later as the 'One' went through life, was...

The Bookseller reports that Secretary Halbe Zjilstra from the Netherlands’ Department of Culture has announced there will be no fixed price for e-books in the Netherlands. The Netherlands (like much of Europe) has fixed prices on paper books, meant to secure wide availability of titles. However, e-books still have less than 1% of market share in the Netherlands. A study commissioned by the Netherlands government determined that even though the rise of e-books might harm bookstores, slapping a fixed price on them will not help bookstores and will harm the overall e-book market by diminishing innovation. I have...

From the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) On 14 July 2010 the KB and Google signed a contract for the digitization of 160.000 books from the collection of the KB that are free of copyright. Both parties made this widely known by means of their websites and via the press, and have consistently replied to questions about the content of the cooperative agreement. Following a request in the United Kingdom, which was granted, to make the details of the contract between the British Library and Google public on the grounds of the Freedom of...

We reported on thelauch of eLinea earlier.  Now it looks as if they are going global.  From their blog: Fleur Stigter writes about new online publishing initiatives and critically examined eLinea in an extensive article. Stigter: “since February the Dutch have access to a unique news service [...] and important Dutch publishers are very willing to participate.” She wonders: will eLinea sweep international news organisations off their feet? In her article Fleur gives a detailled overview of the development of eLinea and how the service works. What does eLinea offer to participating publishers and what does the subscription model look like? And what...

From the Google Translation of the site's front page: Publishing your own book: easy, quick and free! Start met je boek Start your book ...

From the press release: eReaders Group today announces the launch of eLinea in The Netherlands. eLinea is an ereading platform where readers can subscribe to articles from top notch national newspapers and regional news articles, opinion columns, news items from leading magazines, cartoons by well-known artists and videocasts from national tv-channels. Readers can access the articles on a range of popular devices like tablets, smartphones, ereaders and computers. eLinea debuts with article channels from a great number of leading publishers in The Netherlands and Belgium: NRC Handelsblad, Elsevier, Nieuws.nl, Vrij Nederland, Opzij, Psychologie Magazine, J/M voor Ouders, Dolf Jansen, Friesch Dagblad, Joep...

From the Netherlands' website eReaders, by way of a Google translation: From today the new platform Ongo available. Ongo is a personal platform for new readers turn to for news articles from various sources. The makers want to make it easy for users to find news, organize and share with others. Ongo was founded in 2010 by Alex Kazim, including previously worked at eBay and Skype. In September 2010 was a start-up investment of $ 12,000,000 of Gannett Company, The New York Times and The Washington Post. According to Kazim Ongo is a platform on which the reader is central. "Ongo redefines legibility...

From A PQ Announcement: ProQuest will digitize more than 30,000 rare early books from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands, capturing every volume in high-resolution color scans. This is the third major European national library to participate in ProQuest’s Early European Books project after the Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy. As with the agreements in Denmark and Italy, the material will be free to access in the host country. [Clip] ProQuest will scan the library’s holdings up to 1700, beginning with books printed in the Netherlands before moving onto works from other...

According to ebookmagazine, bol.com, an online book retailer, has launched new ereader and shopping apps on the iOS and Android platform. Both are aimed at Dutch readers. The Android app will come preloaded on all Galaxy Tablets and smartphones bol sells and the iOS app will be available on the iTunes store. txtr CEO Christophe Maire said the Dutch eBook market “is ahead of most other European countries” with more 1500 eBooks are downloaded per day. As with txtr’s own-label offering, the app allows readers to buy new titles and ‘side load’ existing ePub titles protected by Adobe’s DRM –...

Techdirt has a couple of pieces about digital piracy today. First, a Dutch court has ruled that it is actually advantageous to right-holders (at least in the Netherlands) that unauthorized download sites exist, because the downloads from those sites help to pump up the amount of the Dutch private copying levy. The Court of Appeal stated that the private copying exemption in the Dutch Copyright Act does not differentiate between copies made from legal or illegal sources. With reference to statements made by the Minister of Justice, the Court argued that the legitimate interest of...