In a filing with the United States district court for southern New York, Apple claims the Department of Justice has its story all wrong. The Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Apple and multiple book publishers earlier this week alleging that the group colluded to fix the prices of electronic books. In a recently released document filed with the court on Wednesday, Apple’s counsel addressed the charges by claiming the DOJ has its story backwards — Apple wasn’t working with publi...

Three separate lawsuits have been filed in China on behalf of 12 writers who claim Apple is selling unlicensed versions of their works in its iBookstore. Apple is accused of selling 59 unlicensed works in total, and the three suits seek a combined $3.5 million in damages. Apple has not denied the allegations, though the company did say that it responds to intellectual property complaints quickly. “As an IP holder ourselves, we understand the importance of protecting intellectual property and when we rec...

In a special January event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Apple’s VP of marketing Phil Schiller announced that the Cupertino-based company was looking to change the textbook industry with iBooks 2 and iBooks Author. McGraw Hill Education believes that the new iPad, which was announced on March 7th, will truly revolutionize education. According to Vineet Madan, McGraw Hill’s vice president of new ventures, the discounted iPad 2 will now allow more schools to deploy iPads to their studen...

Kobo, purveyor of eReaders and eBook software across a variety of platforms, announced on Tuesday that it will be acquired by Japan-based Rakuten. Rakuten will purchase 100% of outstanding shares of of Kobo for $315 million in cash. Based in Toronto, Ontario, Kobo was spun off of Canadian retailer Indigo in late 2009, and the company has struggled to compete against the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble in the eBook space. ”We are very excited about this next step,” said Rakuten CEO Hiroshi...

We’re live from Barnes & Noble’s press conference here in New York City where the bookseller is expected to take the wraps off its sequel to the Nook Color tablet. Though the firm used a heavily customized, unrecognizable version of Google’s Android platform to power the original Nook Color, it is still one of the most popular Android tablets in the short history of the media tablet category. Barnes & Noble has reportedly shipped more than 3 million Nook Color slates to date, and wit...

Barnes & Noble is holding a press conference on Monday morning where the company is expected to unveil a new color eBook reader that will go head-to-head with Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire tablet. According to a recent report, the slate in question will be Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color 2 and it will feature a 7-inch 1024 x 600-pixel display, 16GB of storage, 1GB of RAM and a dual-core 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4 processor. Rumors also suggest the tablet will be priced at $249, $50 more than the hotly...

As Amazon prepares to launch its first tablet offering this fall, the tech press seems to be in agreement that the device will give owners deeply integrated access to the company’s suite of digital services. It will download books from Amazon’s Kindle book store, stream music from the company’s Cloud Player service, pull down movies from Amazon Instant Video, and provide a window into Amazon’s numerous additional services. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is al...

Kobo on Monday took the wraps off its latest eBook reader, which touts one feature in particular that should be of interest to future eReader buyers: touch. The unveiling comes just one day ahead of Barnes & Nobles’s press event in New York City — which we’ll be covering live — where the company is expected to introduce its new black and white NOOK. The Kobo eReader Touch Edition, also a black and white reader, features a 6-inch “Real Touch” E Ink touchscreen display with 16 sh...

Titles from major book publisher Random House will now appear in Apple’s iBooks store. The news was one of many talking points covered earlier today at Apple’s media event. Random House had previously been the only major publisher not represented in Apple’s popular iOS book store, as it was not willing to grant Apple the 30% cut taken on titles sold through iBooks. The addition of Random House is a major coup for Apple as it looks to compete with the likes of Amazon’s Kindle bookstore...

It took quite a while, but Amazon’s Kindle application is finally available for the Windows Phone 7 platform as of Tuesday evening. The app offers exactly what you think it might — the ability to purchase and read over 750,000 eBooks in Amazon’s library, free access to preview the first chapter of each, Amazon’s Whispersync service to keep data in sync across devices, personalized recommendations and more. As is expected, the app is a smooth operator on Windows Phone 7 devices, and the des...

The Amazon Kindle’s position as one of the top electronics gifts of the 2010 holiday season is reaffirmed today as Amazon notes that the Wi-Fi-only version of its popular eBook reader is currently sold out. New orders will not be delivered until after Christmas, and Amazon suggests interested parties purchase the more expensive Kindle 3G instead, if delivery by Christmas is desired.Due to overwhelming customer demand, Kindle (Wi-Fi) is temporarily out of stock. Orders placed today will arrive after Dec...

Apple updated its popular eBook reader application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch on Wednesday. iBooks 1.2 adds a variety of new functionality, including the addition of fully illustrated books, the ability to organize books into collections and AirPrint support. Apple’s full change log is as follows:Experience fully illustrated books, from children’s picture books to beautifully designed art books, available for download in the iBookstore.Organize your books and PDFs into personal Collection...

Following a report on Tuesday questioning the ethics surrounding free public-domain eBooks that were reformatted and made available for sale in Amazon’s Kindle store, BGR has learned that a similar scenario exists in Barnes & Noble’s NOOKbook store. In a thread entitled Scammers and Bottom Feeders: NOOKBooks Open for Business on Barnes & Noble’s public forums, users share a variety of complaints surrounding public-domain eBooks that are available for sale in the NOOKbook store. Beyon...

A report in Tuesday’s Washington Post reveals that Amazon is apparently selling free public-domain eBooks that have had their license information stripped. The eBooks in question originate from Project Gutenberg and are available there for free in a variety of formats including ePub, HTML and Kindle. Project Gutenberg — not to be confused with 80s legend Steve Guttenberg — was founded by eBook inventor Michael Hart and is known as the first generally available collection of free eBooks. It is also m...