E Books

Publisher Macmillan announced Friday that it is settling its case with the Department of Justice in its lawsuit over e-books. The DOJ had accused five major publishers and Apple of conspiring to set e-book prices; Macmillan was the last publisher to agree to settle. "I had an old fashioned belief that you should not settle if you have done no wrong. As it turns out, that is indeed old fashioned," Macmillan Chief Executive John Sargent wrote in a letter posted on the publisher's  website.

Eddy Cue, the Apple Inc. executive in charge of negotiating the company's controversial e-book deals, defended how the tech giant started its online bookstore as he made his highly anticipated appearance on the witness stand in a federal antitrust trial. During five hours of testimony Thursday and questioning that at times grew contentious, government lawyers pressed their case that the agreements Apple signed in 2010 with five major publishers amounted to a conspiracy to get consumers to pay more for electronic books.

The Kindle was not guaranteed to catch on when Amazon introduced its e-reader five years ago, but e-books are now a routine alternative to hardcovers and paperbacks, constituting about 25% of publishing's revenues. That's good news for the trees, but it presents holiday shoppers with a quandary: How do you give and wrap an e-book? First, it helps to know what kind of device your recipient has. There are dozens of e-readers and tablets on the market, with prices ranging from $69 for text-only Kindles to the $829 top-of-the-line iPad.

NEW YORK - Apple Inc. and five major publishers conspired to fix prices on e-books, costing consumers hundreds of millions of dollars, a U.S. Justice Department attorney argued during the first day of a marquee antitrust trial. Apple's attorney denied the government's accusations and said that the company had brought innovation to a broken e-book market that has benefited consumers. The verbal sparring came on the first day of a federal antitrust trial in which federal prosecutors accused Apple of colluding with the publishers.

The literary website the Millions is getting into the e-book business: Starting Tuesday, it will publish e-books that are available on Amazon.com, in Apple's iBookstore and at Barnes & Noble. While its website is about books, authors and publishing, its e-books will move into other realms. The Millions' debut is "Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame and the History of the Worst Thing Ever" by Mark O'Connell. It's a long essay that begins with the botched Jesus fresco repair that looked like a monkey, moves to Susan Sontag's "On Camp" and goes on from there.

This post has been corrected. See the note below. The announcement this week that Playboy is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Playboy Interview with a 50-interviews-in-50-days e-book series  sent me back to my bookshelves, where I've kept a copy G. Barry Golson's “The Playboy Interview” for 30 years. Golson's book, which I bought in college, collected the most prominent interviews of Playboy's first two decades, including in-depth conversations with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jimmy Hoffa, Miles Davis, The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Jimmy Carter, who during the 1976 presidential campaign famously admitted that he had “committed adultery in my heart.” All these interviews (with the exception of Hoffa and Malcolm X, and you have to wonder why they're missing)

Is it legal to sell a used e-book? A Massachusetts start-up that hopes to start selling used e-books and other used digital content this summer suffered a legal setback in court recently when a federal judge ruled that it had infringed the rights of Capitol Records by facilitating the resale of copied digital music. And now a judge in Germany has ruled that digital books can't be resold by purchasers, ruling against a consumer group that was seeking the right for German readers to do so. At issue is a very simple legal principle.

When word leaked that the Justice Department was threatening to sue Apple and five major book publishers for allegedly fixing the price of e-books, the opposition from some tech advocates was swift and sharp. The feds were looking at the wrong problem, these critics said. The new pricing model adopted by Apple and the publishers promoted competition in the markets for e-books, e-book readers and hard-copy books that Amazon had come to dominate. Attacking that model might lower the price for some e-books, but it would hurt the rest of the book industry and give Amazon an inside track to a publishing monopoly.

WASHINGTON -- Antitrust officials are expected to announce Wednesday that they are filing suit against Apple Inc. and five major book publishers for allegedly colluding to fix the price of e-books. News reports said the Justice Department sued Apple, along with Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and Penguin. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder and the head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, Sharis Pozen, have scheduled a news conference in Washington for 9 a.m. PDT to announce "a significant antitrust matter.

On Thursday evening, it suddenly became impossible to purchase most e-books on Amazon. It was possible to buy hardcovers, paperbacks and audiobooks, but not most Kindle e-books from the online retailer's website. The purchase of most Kindle e-books had been blocked -- however, those distributed through Amazon Digital Services, or published by one of Amazon's publishing houses, remained available. Concerns that Amazon had deliberately removed the ability to purchase certain books sent ripples through the publishing industry -- those who were on Twitter, at least.

For a company that beat down prices of online music, Apple Inc. finds itself in the odd situation of defending itself against government claims that it conspired to fix prices for electronic books. Starting Monday, the Justice Department will lay out in a civil antitrust trial its accusations that Apple masterminded a cartel with publishers to raise prices in an e-book market in which the Cupertino, Calif., company remains a bit player compared with rival Amazon.com Inc. As opening statements begin, perhaps the biggest question hovering over the proceedings is this: Why is this case even going to trial?

In a move to bump up physical book sales, Stephen King will not release an e-book version of his new novel , "Joyland," the Wall Street Journal reports. It's something of a radical move for the man who stood onstage with Amazon's Jeff Bezos in 2009 to introduce the Kindle 2. This time King has decided to throw his support behind brick-and-mortar booksellers. "I have no plans for a digital version," King told the Journal. "In the meantime, let people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one. " However, the print book is still available for pre-order from online retailer Amazon.

The total revenue generated by e-book sales in the U.S. in 2012 was $3.04 billion, a 44.2% increase over the year before. That gain was announced in the preliminary year-end report released Wednesday by BookStats, a joint statistics project between the Assn. of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group. In 2012, e-book sales accounted for 20% of trade book sales revenue. Overall, trade book sales rose 6.9%. Trade books are those found in brick-and-mortar bookstores and online retail booksellers.

Is it legal to sell a used e-book? A Massachusetts start-up that hopes to start selling used e-books and other used digital content this summer suffered a legal setback in court recently when a federal judge ruled that it had infringed the rights of Capitol Records by facilitating the resale of copied digital music. And now a judge in Germany has ruled that digital books can't be resold by purchasers, ruling against a consumer group that was seeking the right for German readers to do so. At issue is a very simple legal principle.

John Scalzi's appearance at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was preceded by a visit to our video booth, where he talked about his new project, a return to his "Old Man's War" series. Fans may have already read much of the fifth book, "The Human Division," which has been published in 13 e-book installments. Scalzi tells L.A. Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg how that worked, and what additional material readers will be getting if they purchase the hardcover. At 432 pages, it's the longest book Scalzi has written.

George Saunders' new short story “Fox 8” offers an unexpected twist on the author's darkly comic sensibility. Narrated by a fox who has learned human language (the Fox 8 of the title), it's a taut little tale of development and displacement in which the narrator and other members of his skulk are driven away from their habitat by the construction of a new shopping mall. What sets “Fox 8” apart are two things - first, Saunders' choice to write it in a highly idiosyncratic dialect full of phonetic misspellings (“First may I say,” he begins, “sorry for any werds I spel rong.

--Springtime is Christmas for the home-improvement industry, and Home Depot is marking the season with its third annual "Spring Black Friday" promotion. With warmer-than-usual weather over much of the country, the chain is rolling out deals nationwide, instead of region by region as in previous years. The promotions, which include 50% off select patio furniture, are to continue through April 11. Balmy temperatures have showered good fortune on the industry at large. Retail sales for garden and outdoor-home-improvement merchants rose 18% in February compared with the same period a year ago, according to Global Hunter Securities.

The Justice Department laid out its price-fixing case Wednesday against Apple and five major publishers, three of whom settled without admitting any wrongdoing. On Friday it was Apple's turn to speak. As ever,  the company was terse. Here's the entire statement released by spokesman Tom Neumayr: The DOJ's accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true. The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon's monopolistic grip on the publishing industry.

Book sales rose 6.2% last year in the U.S., thanks to the continued growth of electronic publishing, according to newly released StatShot data from the Assn. of American Publishers. Electronic books, which a decade ago represented a tiny fraction of the industry's revenue, now are the fastest-growing segment of the publishing business. Indeed, sales of digital versions of books for children and young adults more than doubled in 2012 from a year earlier. The digital transition has been gathering momentum since the 2007 introduction of e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle, and accelerated with the soaring popularity of tablet computers that followed the 2010 launch of Apple Inc.'s iPad.

Sandra Cisneros' first novel, "The House on Mango Street," has sold more than 5 million copies. A coming-of-age story, it's that rare book that can be assigned to grade-school children and college students, and it's been translated into several languages (the Spanish translation was the work of the great Mexican essayist, journalist and novelist Elena Poniatowska). But Cisneros first published "The House on Mango Street" in 1984 (with the University of Houston-based Arte Publico Press )