“The approval opens the door for Amazon and other retailers to steeply discount e-book titles,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s Chad Bray and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg. Amazon is bound to be delighted by the settlement approval, as its $9.99 price-point is what caused publishers to rebel against it in 2010 and make those pricing agreements with Apple in the first place. Amazon is expected to drop its prices back down to $9.99, and Bosman reports that “other retailers, like Barnes & Noble, could feel pressure to respond.” Hello, e-book price war.

Sales of e-books more than doubled from 2010 to 2011, according to a survey of nearly 2,000 publishers released Wednesday. E-books jumped from 6 percent of the market to 15 percent and e-revenue for new adult fiction is now higher than the revenue for hardcovers.

Sales for books overall dropped 2.5 percent to $27.2 billion and 12.6 percent at physical stores, thanks in part to the fall of the Borders superstore chain. But revenue for children’s/young adult fiction increased 12 percent, with “The Hunger Games” selling millions of copies and readers of all ages buying them.

The survey was compiled by the Book Industry Study Group, a research organization, and the Association of American Publishers.

When Apple launched the iBookstore back in 2009, it had a huge impact on Amazon; it dramatically reduced the retail giant’s market share of the ebook business from 99% to just 60% in three years, breaking its monopoly on ebooks.

But it wasn’t all good for publishers.

Apple attracted publishers with an iTunes pricing model that meant they could pick and choose their ebook prices, then provide Apple with a 30% cut — just like Mac and iOS developers do. Amazon’s plan was vastly different. Instead, it paid publishers $15 each for their books, and then sold them to Kindle users for just $10.

This was great for the user, but publishers were worried that over time, this price model would devalue their content. And as Amazon was in control of the market, it could, at any time, decide to pay only $5 per book instead of $15, and publishers would have no choice but to accept it.

In the early days, then, publishers did their business with Amazon because there was no alternative. Then iBooks came along, which allowed them to regain control. But Apple had a catch: Four of the six major publishers in the United States would have to sign up, or none of them would be able to take advantage of the deal. In the end, five of them did.

The result of this was that publishers actually made less for each book sold through the iBookstore than they did selling their content through Amazon — sometimes up to $100 million less each year. But it meant Amazon’s monopoly was finally broken.

“Publishers believed that Amazon was attempting to control every part of the industry,” Auletta writes, and that they were “worried that bookstores, burdened by the costs of rent and staff, were unable to compete with Amazon. Without the stores, publishers would lose their main customers, and their strongest ally in marketing.”

For customers, this should be great news, because it means we have choice, and that we can’t be forced into paying certain prices because only one retailer is selling ebooks. However, the DoJ believes that customers were harmed because Apple and the publishers colluded to make prices higher.

If the case goes against Apple and the two remaining publishers who haven’t already settled with the DoJ, it could have a huge impact on the ebook business. Amazon could regain some of its monopoly yet again.

By Killian Bell (9:28 am PDT, Jun 18)

Earlier today, OverDrive released a new version of OverDrive Media Console for Windows computers. The updated desktop application—OMC v3.2.2—allows users to return MP3 audiobooks before the end of the specified lending period, a feature that will allow Windows users to devour even more audiobooks from your library’s digital collection.

For OMC v3.2.3, the system requirements have not changed. Readers can install the free app on computers running Windows XP (or newer), and users with OverDrive Media Console already installed will be notified that an update is available.

Find the updated app at http:// www.overdrive.com/Software/omc

The U.S. Justice Department had sued Apple and five major publishing houses. The suit alleges that ahead of the 2010 launch of the original iPad (and iBooks) Apple colluded with Macmillan, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster to raise e-book prices by adopting a agency model for pricing.

Before the iPad launched in 2010, Amazon effectively owned the e-book market with its Kindle e-reader. Operating on a wholesale model for pricing, Amazon paid a wholesale price for e-books, then set its own prices for them. Much to the publishers’ frustration, Amazon used books in a way no retailer had done before: as a loss leader. It sold the e-books below wholesale in order to drive sales of the Kindle. Publishers feared that this would create unreasonable expectations among customers, and that it would drive down the cost of hard copy books – especially hardcovers, which are the publishers’ biggest money makers.

While Barnes & Noble tried to elbow its way into the e-book market with its Nook e-reader (which was arguably superior to the Kindle in terms of hardware), it met with little real success, never getting closer than a distant second to the Kindle. When Apple launched the iPad and its iBooks e-reader software, though, it also announced new deals with the five publishers named in the Justice Department’s lawsuit. Under the agency model, it’s the publishers who set the prices of e-books, and the retailer – in this case Apple – gets a 30% cut off the top for every book sold. Once the iPad took off in popularity – to the point that it harmed sales of e-readers like the Kindle and Nook – the publishers were able to force Amazon and Barnes & Noble to enter into the same sort of agency model agreements they had with Apple.

All of this raised major concerns with the Justice Department (and the European Commission), which thought the switch to the agency model smacked of anti-competitive collusion. They finally filed an antitrust suit against all six companies earlier this month. While three of the companies – Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster – reached quick settlements to avoid a costly legal battle, the other three did not. Macmillan, Penguin, and Apple all issued statements insisting they had done nothing wrong. What’s more, they claimed that although the agency model did result in higher e-book prices, it actually fostered competition by breaking Amazon’s stranglehold on the e-book market….

For complete article, copy and paste this link in you browser’s URL box: http://www.webpronews.com/apples-agency-model-was-not-invented-for-e-books-2012-04

John Lithgow’s The Poets Corner: The one and only poetry book for the whole family; or She walks in Beauty; A woman’s journey through poems, by Caroline Kennedy.

Do you like to read classic poetry like Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or a fun read like The Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear?

Visit our MCLS OverDrive website and see the great poetry you can borrow for your eReader device.

The Justice Department and 15 states sued Apple Inc. and major book publishers Wednesday, alleging a conspiracy that raised the price of electronic books. They said the scheme cost consumers more than $100 million in the past two years by adding $2 or $3, sometimes as much as $5, to the price of each e-book.

If there was price fixing, even the e-book version of the hot-selling Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, the late genius behind Apple computers, may have cost too much.

Attorney General Eric Holder said executives at the highest levels of the companies conspired to eliminate competition among e-book sellers. Justice’s antitrust chief, Sharis Pozen, said the executives were desperate to get Amazon.com — the marketer of Kindle e-book readers — to raise the $9.99 price point it had set for the most popular e-book titles, because that was substantially below their hardcover prices.

The federal government reached a settlement with three of the publishers, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Shuster. But it will proceed with its lawsuit in federal court in New York City against Apple and Holtzbrinck Publishers, doing business as Macmillan, and The Penguin Publishing Co. Ltd., doing business as Penguin Group…….”

To read the complete article, paste this link in your address bar: http://tinyurl.com/blr2oar

Note: Be sure to bring your device, laptop (If available) and USB cord with you when seeking assistance with your device.

April 2 – 10am – Noon
April 9 – 2pm – 4pm
April 16 – 6pm – 8pm
April 23 – 2pm – 4pm

The latest version of OverDrive Media Console for iOS devices gives readers fingertip access to dictionary definitions. This morning, we launched OMC for iOS version 2.4.1. This updated OverDrive Media Console app for iPhone and iPad users includes a dictionary look-up feature with Wikipedia integration, several bug fixes and other performance improvements to make the eReading experience even better.
If you have a previous version of OMC for iOS on your device, you should see the update appear in your App Store shortly—if not already. New users can download the app from the Apple App Store.
The new OMC for iOS app is more functional and intuitive than ever before, streamlining the experience for iPhone and iPad users. You’ll find the dictionary look-up feature especially convenient: Just tap a word with your finger to find the definition. You can also navigate to the corresponding Wikipedia page for more information.