It seems that Random House could well be considering keeping its content away from Apple’s iPad when the device eventually hits, for fear of sparking a price war across platforms.

Still no word on if and when we can expect to see iBooks in Europe...

According to the report coming from the Financial Times, Apple’s iBooks, which is to be rolled out with the iPad, has managed to secure the rest of the top five book publishers, including Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Harper-Collins and Penguin. The big fear, as with Amazon’s Kindle platform last year, is that Apple’s pricing setup might well see books move into a price war the likes of which they’ve not seen in a very long time.

Continue Reading

Amazon has announced the availability of the Mac version of its Kindle for desktop application, widening the audience of the Kindle store even further.

Releasing on as many platforms as possible is suiting Amazon very well indeed...

Naturally, Amazon is pleased with the move, which brings access to the company’s vastly successful Kindle digital bookshop to just about every major platform going, and announcing that it hopes to make the Kindle shop available to those who pick up the iPad in the not too distant future. Of course, that’s barring any backlash from Apple, which has, in the past, raised issues with apps that “duplicate the functionality of the device” with the iPhone, something that could rear its head again with the iPads iBooks app.

Continue Reading

It seems that Apple’s upcoming iPad tablet won’t be shipping with the company’s iBooks software, one of the main talking points of the device.

Not bundling iBooks seems a strange move

It seems that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has applied some fairly close reading to Apple’s description of its upcoming tablet device. Apparently, when it comes to time to list the various bits and pieces that the iPad has to offer its users, Apple describes the iBooks app by saying that,

Continue Reading