Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Is Judge Denise Cote biased? An article from Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt quotes a lawyers-reviewing-judges site to suggest that she has a habit of “deciding early on who the good guy is and who the bad guy is and ruling accordingly.” It also points out that, for all her complaints about the publishers and Apple being [...]

The post Reviews suggest Apple antitrust case’s Judge Cote may have tendency to bias appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

So, arguments wrapped up today in the Department of Justice’s anti-trust case against Apple. Juli Monroe has already done an excellent job of pulling out some slides from the Powerpoint shows and noting what the wavy lines on the charts mean. Over on Fortune, Philip Elmer-Dewitt covers the arguments in a more general sense, with [...]

The post The Apple trial, agency pricing, and The Battle of $9.99 appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

"I'm not comfortable discussing the contents of that meeting."

That's what Russell Grandinetti, Amazon's (AMZN) vice president for Kindle content, said when asked in court Friday about a meeting he attended in Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' Seattle boathouse on Sunday Jan. 24, 2010.

It was the only question in more than four hours of testimony that Grandinetti declined to answer.

Jan. 24 was a significant date in several respects. Amazon executives knew that Apple (AAPL) had scheduled a major product announcement for the following Wednesday.

A Dartmouth strategy professor on why Amazon may succeed and the Androids could fail Fire and iPad "The innovation game is changing," writes Dartmouth's Ron Adner in the Harvard Business Review. "Delivering great products is no longer sufficient for success. And as the [Amazon's Kindle] Fire's limited memory, ho-hum processor, and lack of camera demonstrate, great products may not even be necessary. Rather, what matters is delivering great solutions." The key to success in consumer electronics these days, Adner maintains, is building and maintaining relationships -- with consumers and with partners. This is something Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) understand.

They liked the price, the color screen and the selection of books on Amazon (AMZN). They wish it had a volume control button and a camera and that the battery lasted longer. Those are some of the results of a survey of 254 Kindle Fire owners conducted in January by ChangeWave Research, a service of 451 Research. 54% said they were very satisfied with their new tablet, which is better than the 39% "other tablet devices" got in a November survey, but considerably less than the 74% of Apple (AAPL) iPad owners who said they were very satisfied.

In a note to clients issued Monday, Hudson Square Research's Daniel Ernst reported on the results of a pre-holiday scouting trip he took to retail stores in New York and Connecticut over the weekend -- only a handful of shopping days before Christmas -- where he found "floor traffic up materially, but lines at checkout short."

Demand for tablet computers was strong, he wrote, with Apple's (AAPL) iPad maintaining its lead. Amazon's (AMZN) tablet sales, however, were a mystery.