Microsoft Corp.

 Britain's biggest department store will be the first retailer outside the United States to sell the bookstore chain's e-reader, selling the devices at each of its 37 stores.

The Nook has emerged as the main rival to Amazon’s Kindle range in the United States. The cheapest model costs $99, or around £63.

In its response to recent filings from Apple, publishers and booksellers on its proposed ebook settlement with three publishers, the Department of Justice addresses few specific complaints (PDF; full filing embedded below). Rather, citing the “unmistakable consumer harm that has resulted from the conspiracy in this case,” the DOJ calls on Judge Denise Cote to approve the settlement without a hearing.

Last week, attorney Bob Kohn and the Authors Guild sought permission to act as “friends of the court” in the proposed settlement and filed amicus briefs.

Several blogs were reporting this morning on Barnes & Noble’s announcement that it will sell the Nook in the UK this fall, marking the first time in its 95-year-history that it has ever expanded overseas. But, as this article on Paid Content points out, it may be too little, too late:

“Kindle has already been in the U.K. for two years and recently partnered with British bookstore chain Waterstone’s to sell Kindles in its stores. Rakuten’s Kobo is already in the U.K., too, and both companies are expanding rapidly to other countries."

Add another happy beneficiary of the publishing powerhouse “Fifty Shades of Grey”: Barnes & Noble.

Sales of the erotic trilogy, which has dominated paperback and e-book best-seller lists for most of the year, along with the liquidation of the Borders chain in 2011, helped lift comparable bookstore sales in the fiscal first quarter at Barnes & Noble by 4.6 percent, the company said on Tuesday.

Apple‘s valuation reached $621.64 billion Monday morning, making it the most valuable company in history.

The company’s stock reached an all-time high of $664.65 per share early Monday afternoon, following strong sales projections for its as-yet-unannounced next-generation iPhone device, the iPhone 5.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today announced that its award-winning NOOK reading experience and leading digital bookstore are coming to the United Kingdom this autumn through a new www.nook.co.uk online storefront, marking the first time the company will expand its business internationally. The world’s largest bookseller will also offer its highly sought-after NOOK digital products and content to UK reading and entertainment lovers through partnerships with leading retailers expected to be announced shortly. These well-known UK partners are expected to support the NOOK offering there through both established physical and online channels.

Maria Semple made an instant, jarring discovery when she moved with her boyfriend and daughter from Los Angeles to Seattle, a city whose Patagonia-clad inhabitants like to talk about bicycling, the environment and the eternally dull question (in her opinion) of whether it might rain.

“It’s just not a funny place,” said Ms. Semple, a novelist and veteran comedy writer who worked on the television shows “Arrested Development” and “Mad About You.”

Amazon is a case of mysterious and magical realism. I find myself inside a coterie of near certifiable money managers and analysts who believe Amazon is a “creative destruction” operator, hell bent on transforming retailing and book publishing, and likely to emerge as the Wal-Mart of the Internet. The Amazon story is about scale and momentum in general merchandise sales, here and abroad. I don’t care how many Kindles they deliver or their burgeoning downloads in books, music, video games and streaming of films.

When the news of the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Apple and five of the nation’s largest book publishers became public earlier this spring, it took many by surprise. The suit accused Apple and the publishers of illegally colluding to resist Amazon’s aggressive strategy of pricing many new and bestselling books at $9.99 — well below the prices charged for hardcover copies and below what many in the industry say it costs to produce those volumes. The popular conception of an antitrust suit involves the government going after…

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com, and his wife, MacKenzie, have agreed to donate $2.5 million to help pass a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington State, instantly becoming among the largest financial backers of gay marriage rights in the country. With the gift, the couple have doubled the money available to the proponents of Referendum 74, which would legalize same-sex marriage in the state by affirming a law that passed the Legislature this year. Courts or lawmakers have declared gay marriage legal in six other states, but backers of such measures have never succeeded at the ballot box.