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Judges question Apple ebook verdict and Amazon’s role


Jeff John Roberts's avatarGigaom

In a new twist in the long running antitrust case against Apple, an appeals court on Monday cast doubt on the Justice Department’s theory that the company brokered an illegal conspiracy among book publishers, and asked instead why the government’s focus has not been on Amazon.

The 90-minute hearing, which took place at the Second Circuit Court in Manhattan, represented a major shift in momentum in a case that has until now gone completely against Apple. On Monday, the three appeals court judges suggested that District Judge Denise Cote might have been too quick to conclude that Apple’s pricing arrangements with five publishers violated antitrust laws.

“Would it not matter that all those people got together to defeat a monopolist? It’s like the mice that got together to put a bell on a cat,” U.S. Circuit Judge Dennis Jacobs told the Justice Department’s lawyer, Malcolm Stewart.

The cat in question here is [company]Amazon[/company], which controlled over…

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Pottermore Christmas, day 4: Cursed necklaces and Quidditch chasers


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Pottermore Christmas, Day 3: All about potions and cauldrons


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Today’s Pottermore treat: A peek into Diagon Alley (and J.K. Rowling’s process)


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On the Books: ‘The Invention of Wings’ is Amazon’s bestseller in 2014


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J.K. Rowling’s new Pottermore material hints at Snape’s past


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The Battle for FanFic


The link below is to an article that looks at the battle for fanfic between Amazon and Wattpad.

For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/dec/08/amazon-wattpad-fanfic-retail

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On the Books: Hachette to experiment with Twitter


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After fighting all year with Amazon, Hachette partners with Gumroad to sell books directly to readers


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Hachette will start selling books straight from Twitter


Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

Hachette Book Group will start selling books straight from tweets, though it can’t be labeled more than an experiment for now: The publisher has partnered with digital distributor Gumroad to sell three gifty print books “for a limited time and in limited quantities” via the books’ authors’ tweets.

The print titles are Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking (starting December 11), Chris Hadfield’s You Are Here (starting December 15) and The Onion’s The Onion Magazine: The Iconic Covers that Transformed an Undeserving World (starting December 18). Each book sold will be accompanied by “an exclusive bonus item” — in the case of The Onion’s book, for instance, it’s a set of notecards.

“With so much of our book marketing done socially now, in-stream [company]Twitter[/company] purchasing is a natural next step,” Michael Pietsch, Hachette Book Group CEO, said in a statement.

Here’s an example from another Gumroad partnership that shows what this will look…

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