According to The Telegraph this morning, Apple is ready to settle the case in Europe but will fight on in the USA. Joaquín Almunia, the European Union competition commissioner, said he has received settlement offers from Apple and all the publishers other than Penguin. Penguin has said it will not settle either case out of court because it has “done nothing wrong”.
The Telegraph explains:
The technology giant has been accused of colluding with five publishers to fix the price of ebooks, in order to loosen the stranglehold Amazon’s Kindle has on the ebook market and give its own iPad device a boost. The controversy centres on the so-called “agency model” of pricing, which allows publishers to dictate the charge for each ebook as long as the retailer gets 30pc of the profits. Publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Group, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan all signed up to the scheme with Apple, before it was adopted by other retailers.