“If Apple loses the legal case filed against it and book publishers on Wednesday over e-book pricing, will it be deeply wounded in its growing rivalry with Amazon? Not likely, analysts say,” Nick Wingfield reports for The New York Times.
“Amazon may have lost some share in e-books, but it still dominates the fast-growing market. At the same time, Apple’s failure to trounce Amazon in e-books did little to diminish the appeal of the iPad, which became a smash hit for other reasons,” Wingfield reports. “James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, said research by his company indicated that games, Web browsing, Facebook and other applications are bigger parts of the appeal of the iPad than e-books. ‘The fact is that they didn’t weaken Amazon the way they had hoped to, but it doesn’t harm them,’ Mr. McQuivey said.”
Wingfield reports, “If e-book prices plummet as a result of the lawsuit — one possible outcome — chances are the financial impact on Apple will be small… Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford specializing in antitrust and intellectual property, said he did not expect Apple to give up easily in the case. ‘Apple has a history of being fairly aggressive in litigation,’ Mr. Lemley said. ‘There’s some sense in their corporate culture that we’re right.'”
Read more in the full article here.
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