HarperCollins

BooksOnBoard may have abruptly gone out of business last April but that doesn't mean it's completely gone. Some remnant is still active, and last week it filed an antitrust lawsuit.

Abbey House Media, the Texas-based company that owned and ran BooksOnBoard, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan last Friday. The lawsuit alleges that Apple colluded with 5 publishers, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, to raise the price of ebooks and artificially restrict competition via price controls.

Customers who bought agency-priced ebooks between 2010 and 2012 are receiving credits for those books as a result of the publishers' settlements with the states. Kindle customers appear to be the first to get those credits.

Book publishers, as part of a price-fixing settlement with state governments, agreed to pay small credits to consumers who bought eligible ebooks between 2010 and 2013. Those credits started showing up in Kindle customers’ accounts Tuesday. Barnes & Noble also says credits will start showing up for Nook customers today.

The April issue is all about innovation. In our cover story, "The Innovators," we've spoken with publishers who are developing creative solutions for an increasingly complex and splintered industry.

Canadians will have to wait longer for cheaper e-books, as a move by the Competition Bureau aimed at reducing the prices of the digital reading material has been postponed due to a challenge by Kobo Inc.

The deal struck by the bureau and four major e-book publishers to remove restrictions on retailer discounting was signed on Feb. 7 and due to take effect on Wednesday.

In a significant ruling regarding backlist e-book rights, a New York court this week held that e-book publisher Open Road infringed HarperCollins' copyright with its e-book edition of Jean Craighead George's 1973 bestselling children's book Julie of the Wolves.

"Having accordingly relied on the words of the contract, this Court holds that, by its language, the contract grants to HarperCollins the exclusive right to license electronic publications.

George Packer’s recent article in The New Yorker about the ever-increasing presence of Amazon is simply the latest in a long line of wake-up calls — or calls-to-arms — to the traditional book publishing industry. Amazon’s ability to sell directly to consumers, as well as use consumer insights to predict future purchases, continues to challenge the ways in which publishers think of their business models. In fact, publishers will likely have to change from a business-to-business model to a business-to-consumer model in order to evolve as brands and compete effectively in the marketplace.

Kobo has filed objections to a Competition Bureau agreement impelling four of the biggest publishers operating in Canada to renegotiate their contracts with ebook retailers.

The Feb. 7 consent agreement - the culmination of an 18-month investigation into ebook pricing in Canada - involves Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Canada, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster Canada. It requires the publishers to remove or amend clauses in their distribution agreements that restrict the ability of ebook retailers to offer discounts.

Much of the publishing industry is not in a data-first mindset asserts Tom Davenport in a recent article dubbed "Book Publishing's Big Data Future".  Although Davenport criticizes the publishing industry as a big data underachiever, he admits that's in part because publishers have traditionally worked through intermediaries to reach consumers. But that dynamic is changing.

Audible, the digital audiobook site owned by Amazon that launched audiobook rights platform ACX in 2011 as a way for authors and publishers to profit from their unsold audiobook rights, is now lowering the royalties it pays on those audiobooks.

Last week the Downtown Library in Palo Alto, Calif. hosted a panel discussion on the industry-wide transformations wrought by digital publishing. The panel, entitled "Sea Change: The ePublishing Transformation," was made up of experts hailing from all corners of the industry. Panelists included sources from Scribd, Smashwords, JukePop.