TechRadar reports on Amazon releasing the Kindle Cloud Reader for iPad, presumably to get round Apple banning links to Amazon’s store from inside the Kindle app. This is a smart move, but it’s a section later in the article that caught my eye:

If Apple’s annoyed about the Kindle Cloud Reader web app, it’ll have to file it under ‘quash later’ as it deals with another ebook niggle; the company has been named in a US lawsuit over ebook price fixing.

Here we go.

Filed in San Francisco, the suit accuses Apple of working with major publishers to control pricing, naming Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, which collectively control around 85 per cent of popular fiction and non-fiction titles.

Amazon, of course, is beloved by publishers, who enjoy the manner in which it orders tiny quantities of each book and ruthlessly discounts them until there’s no profit left.

Apple and the named publishers have been working an agency pricing model, whereby publishers become the book sellers and Apple takes a slice of the sales (30 per cent). This means that the publisher-as-bookseller sets the price of a book at whatever it fancies and all other retailers of that ebook have to fall in line; because Apple takes such a huge chunk of the profit, the pricing is alleged to be higher than it otherwise would be.

I’ve not really seen much evidence of this so far on any ebook store. Pricing seems to be dropping, although expectations that ebooks should be almost free because they’re not made of paper are not

The lawsuit claims that publishers “would simply deny Amazon access to the title” if it tried to sell an ebook at below the publisher-set price.”

Hmm.

It seems that the plaintiffs are very pro-Amazon

You think?

with the lawsuit complaint also alleging “that Apple believed that it needed to neutralise the Kindle when it entered the ebook market with its own e-reader, the iPad, and feared that one day the Kindle might challenge the iPad by digitally distributing other media like music and movies.”

That’s the bit that rubs. Apple’s ‘ereader’? What? The iPad was never an ereader, and given the number of Kindles I saw on a recent trip to London (far more than the number of iPads), I can’t see Apple has having somehow battered the Kindle into submission.

Don’t get me wrong: some of Apple’s policies are hateful and stupid. I fully understand its decision to remove direct in-app purchasing through external stores, but also demanding apps remove links to stores (that would then open in Safari) is utterly ridiculous. But it’s also dumb to suggest that Apple’s attempting to “neutralise” the Kindle; if anything, Apple’s policies combined with Amazon’s hardware prices are driving more people to the Kindle, even if they already own an iPad.