Apple

Can you believe those...those...those...sons of bitches at Amazon? After launching almost 20 years ago and making virtually every book-new, used, dead-tree, electronic, audio, and I'm guessing any day now, olfactory-available to everyone in America at good-to-great prices, the company's true character now stands revealed. It's not pretty, folks. Despite a huge market share, Amazon apparentlystill wants books, especially the e-books that everyone agrees are the future of the medium, to be cheaper than what publishers and big-name authors want you to pay for them.

TORONTO, CANADA - June 10, 2014 - Audiobooks.com, the only service that allows members to both stream and download audiobooks, today announced that they are releasing a new Romance Audiobooks, Novels and Stories app for iOS devices. Audiobooks.com extends the Romance Audiobooks app as a first attempt at targeting a niche market based on genre…

The Competition Bureau says it has struck a deal with four publishers that should lower the price of e-books for Canadian consumers.

The federal agency has struck a deal with Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster that will "allow retailers to discount e-books published by four of Canada's largest e-book publishers," it said in an email in response to queries by CBC News.

The publishers will also eliminate what is known as "most-favoured-nation" clauses in their agreements, which links the price, cost or commission of e-books sold at one retailer

The book world is once again in a state of high dudgeon over the "thuggish" behavior of Amazon, which has begun slow-walking customer orders for books published by Hachette (James Patterson, Malcolm Gladwell, a.k.a. J.K. Rowling) in an effort to win more favorable terms in its next contract with the publisher. In a series of breathless commentaries, Amazon has been likened to Vladimir Putin, Tony Soprano and Darth Vader, and accused of pursuing a "scorched-earth capitalism" designed to drive all publishers and competing booksellers out of business

Imagine a bookstore in nearly one billion pockets and purses.

During the live demo event of Apple's unveiling of their new iOS 8 operating system on June 3, Apple made a passing reference to a slide of "iOS 8 features we didn't have time to talk about."

Buried in the fine print but photographed by bloggers was an ebook retailing bombshell: iBooks will come pre-installed on iOS 8.

The ebook will overtake the paperback and hardback as Britons' preferred format for reading their favourite novels by 2018, according to a report. The UK consumer ebook market - which excludes professional and educational books - is forecast to almost triple from £380m to £1bn over the next four years.

Over the same period, accounting group PwC predicts that sales of printed editions will fall by more than a third to £912m as the UK population's reading habits become dominated by tablets, with 50% of the country expected to own an iPad

Apple on Monday unveiled its latest mobile operating system for the iPhone and iPad at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, kicking off a week's worth of developer events for the app-building community.

The iPhone and iPad maker's keynote on Monday included updates on financial figures, sales and shipments, and other numerical nuggets. Here's what you need to know.

The new iPhone and iPad software was unveiled almost exactly one year to the day after the release of iOS 7, its immediate predecessor, following a major redesign of its user interface.

An appeals court this week refused to halt a trial that could require Apple to pay hundreds of millions of dollars over price-fixing, even as the company continues to deny any wrong-doing and seeks an appeal.

In a succinct order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said a trial can go forward on July 14 that will determine how much Apple should pay for brokering a conspiracy with book publishers to fix the price of ebooks.

My long-held conviction that broad-based subscriptions for ebooks were not likely to work is partly based on facts that are now changing. It is still by no means a slam dunk that ebooks must go where Spotify has taken digital music and Netflix has taken the digital distribution of TV and movies, but it looks more likely today than it did six months ago. Still, looks could be deceiving.

Washington, D.C.-Leading library visionaries and experts discuss trends in digital content technology and the current state of library ebook lending in "Digital Discoveries," a new digital supplement from American Libraries magazine.

"There is some reason for optimism," said Alan S. Inouye, guest editor of the digital supplement and director of the American Library Association's (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP). "However, there remain many formidable challenges and exciting opportunities for libraries within the digital content realm in the coming years."