With the trend started by the Amazon MacMillan spat, towards ebooks costing as much (if not a little more) than their physical counterparts, is being more firmly cemented over time, it’s interesting to see statistics from iTunes pricing model.

Looks like these bad boys will be sticking around for a while yet

According to MediaMemo, it seems that Apple gave music publishers the ability to raise the price of their music on its iTunes service early last year, which resulted in some record labels bumping the prices of some songs upwards, while others took the opportunity to drop the prices of certain tracks. The overall result has been an interesting one.

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It seems that Amazon’s ability to offer ebooks at a lower price than Apple’s announced iBook shop is being eroded more quickly than even dire predictions had supposed it might.

Looks like physical books could turn out to be cheaper...

Word comes from Gizmodo that more of Amazon’s “big six” publishers have been pushing prices up to the higher price point for “hardcover bestsellers,” which is an interesting term to use in an entirely data environment. After MacMillan’s move on Monday to see prices bumped to the $15 mark on certain titles, it seems that other publishers have come pouring in with similar requests to make of Amazon’s Kindle Store.

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Amazon has responded to recent reports indicating that it might be looking to open a physical bookshop by denying that the company is considering any such thing, essentially saying that Amazon’s current model is just fine the way it is.

Amazon has long been rumoured to be moving into the world of physical, brick and mortar shops, to supplement its income from its massively successful online shop. Moreover, with Microsoft having recently opened its own first shop, seeing massive success from the Microsoft Store, it seems that now could well be the time for typically digital companies to start boasting a physical presence… now though, Amazon has said that this is not the case.

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With the Christmas season starting to crank up in earnest (you can tell when the ads start hitting the telly), we’re starting to see an increase in sales of both HD media players and Blu-Ray, but it’s interesting to see how well media players are performing.

Western Digitals Media Player is among the most popular.

This might be a little stinted, because of the fact that a lot of our customers tend to be quite technically minded, but we’re seeing a massive surge in the sales of media players and adaptors (like Western Digitials HDTV Media Player). Certainly they’ve grown to be among our most popular products, especially given the Irish fondness for external storage.

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