Apple executive Keith Moerer took the stand in the late morning on the sixth day of the U.S. DOJ’s Apple e-book price fixing trial.
“The government focused once again on the role of MFN in the alleged price-fixing scheme,” Calvin Reid reports for Publishers Weekly. “‘I didn’t think about the impact of the MFN on other retailers,’ Moerer said, ‘It didn’t matter to us.'”
“The government also focused on the relative success of the iBookstore, asking Moerer what market share the store held in the months after launch (about 20%, Moerer said) and what its market share was after several years of operation and adding Random House in 2011 (also about 20%). The government called the iBookstore ‘a failure,’ and charged that ‘Apple pricing was unfair to consumers,’ and that ‘Apple sold fewer books because of the higher price caps,'” Reid reports. “Moerer challenged that characterization: ‘I disagree. E-book sales grew 100% last year at the iBookstore and it had over 100 million customers.’ The government countered that ‘when you drop prices you sell more books,’ and Moerer said, ‘sometimes, yes.'”
Reid reports, “But the government bluntly said, ‘Apple forgot to focus on customers, that’s why the iBookstore is a failure.’ Moerer: ‘That’s not true.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Some “failure” that is. 20% is quite impressive. No wonder Amazon was so pissed that they had to go running to the clueless and inept U.S. DOJ to persecute a fierce competitor.
Apple’s iBookstore “looks to have a chance to grow even further as Apple delivers desktop support for its digital books via an iBooks application for Mac, shipping with the next release of OS X, 10.9 Mavericks, sometime this fall,” Darrell Etherington writes for TechCrunch.
“The iBooks arrival on the desktop should be good for consumers, as it provides one more place to read. Cross-platform reach has been the big advantage of competing stores like the Amazon, Nook and Kobo stores so far, and while Apple’s expansion to the Mac still leaves anyone not on Apple devices out of the loop, so it’s unclear how much adoption will spike,” Etherington writes. “But it’s fair to speculate that iBooks has done well on the back of Apple’s increasingly far-reaching presence in education, since texts feature prominently in its promotional efforts around iBooks (and were again on display at the OS X iBooks unveiling at WWDC).”
Etherington writes, “iBooks on the Mac isn’t going to be revolutionary because it lets you pick up where you left off in the latest Game Of Thrones installment on your iPad, since I think a very small portion of people would prefer reading books on their computer vs. on a mobile device. But it will be huge for the education market.”
Read more in the full article here.
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