After three weeks defending itself in a court case that revolves around alleged e-book price fixing, Apple presented its closing argument yesterday.
The trouble began when the Department of Justice released an email conversation between Steve Jobs and James Murdoch of News Corporation.
In it, Jobs wrote Murdoch should "throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99."
It gets a little more damning. Apple allegedly used its App Store ecosystem to push around publishers that weren't on board. From the NYT report:
After Random House finally agreed to a contract on Jan. 18, 2011, Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of its e-books deals, sent an e-mail to Mr. Jobs attributing the publisher’s capitulation, in part, to 'the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store,' the filing reads.
So let's dive into the deck. A quick note on an unfamiliar term that appears throughout it – "windowing" is a publishing industry term for releasing a physical book on time and delaying the digital release, akin to a movie coming out in theaters and not being available on DVD until many weeks later.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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