They read the PDF of the complaint (linked in the article):

Although Apple is listed as the first defendant, the bulk of the case is really about the publishers involved: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster. According to the government, these publishers greatly feared Amazon's $9.99 Kindle book prices, which they called "wretched," and worked for years on a scheme to raise prices and limit competition. They also feared that consumers would get used to paying $9.99 for bestsellers and ultimately decrease publishing profits.
Apple was more than willing to help; it wanted favorable deals as it entered the ebook market combined with higher margins on more-expensive products.

What's not quite explained is how a new entrant with an unproven product (the iPad) could disrupt the established player (Amazon) by charging <em>higher</em> prices. Unless, of course, the publishers declined to let Amazon sell the ebooks. But equally, collusion for price-fixing is illegal, in the US and elsewhere.

Apple's first antitrust case: one to savour.

LG, that South Korean conglomerate that has mostly spent the last few years fading into Samsung’s shadow, has just announced that it has begun mass production of the world’s first flexible, plastic e-ink display. This is opposed to the hard, heavy, prone-to-cracking glass-laminate e-ink displays found in devices such as the Kindle and Nook.

Exciting. LG isn't explaining in detail how it works, but it looks fantastic.

I somehow acquired two copies of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. What I want to convey to you is that I have a deep and abiding love for books. That is why I must burn them.

Every time I find an ebook copy of a book I have on my shelf, the ebook version is downloaded – redundantly backed up – and placed in my Calibre library. The physical book is burned.

Don't worry; as he says, it's not really Fahrenheit 451 in there. He gives them to charity shops. An interesting discussion ensues in the comments about which is more sustainable - an ebook reader or a book.

Seth Godin:

There's been a long history of ubiquity at the bookstore. With a few extreme exceptions, just about every book is available at every bookstore if you’re willing to order it. Universal availability feels like part of the contract we make with bookstores–we expect them to sell everything. In the digital world, this goes triple, because there’s no issue of shelf space to deal with.

I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link.”

Of course ebooks are software, not really books. This just heightens that. The interesting question: would Amazon allow an ebook whose bibliography linked to other ebook stores? Does it? The gulf between physical and ebooks grows.

The most plausible theory is, as ever, that it's more about the talent behind the product than the product itself.

"At first, I thought that Amazon’s rationale might be similar to the one Google takes on the issue of infringing or objectionable YouTube content: given that 48-hours’-worth of video is being uploaded every minute, it simply isn’t feasible to pre-scan stuff before it’s published. But Google will take it down on receipt of a complaint. That won’t get Amazon off the Kindlespam hook for two reasons: (1) Compared with video, pre-scanning of text is perfectly feasible, and computationally not that difficult; Amazon could easily do it. (2) Detection of infringing content in Kindlespam by rights holders is very difficult for the reasons outlined earlier, so while a take-down-upon-complaint policy is perfectly feasible, complaints will be much less frequent than they are on YouTube.<br />
"So we’re left with a puzzle. Pre-scanning for crap, spam and infringing content in Kindlespam is perfectly feasible — and indeed only Amazon can do it effectively. Yet it does not do it. Why?"

"Because we've come to take printed books for granted, we tend to overlook their enormous flexibility as reading instruments. It's easy to flip through the pages of a physical book, forward and backward. It's easy to jump quickly between widely separated sections, marking your place with your thumb or a stray bit of paper or even a hair plucked from your head (yes, I believe I've done that). You can write anywhere and in any form on any page of a book, using pen or pencil or highlighter or the tip of a burnt match (ditto). You can dog-ear pages or fold them in half or rip them out. You can keep many different books open simultaneously, dipping in and out of them to gather related information. And when you just want to read, the tranquility of a printed book provides a natural shield against distraction."<br />
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Wonder if there will be an ebook backlash in a couple of years?

" BeamItDown Software and the iFlow Reader will cease operations as of May 31, 2011.  We absolutely do not want to do this, but Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device. We cannot survive selling books at a loss and so we are forced to go out of business. We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game. This is a very sad day for innovation on iOS in this important application category. We are a small company that thought we could build a better product. We think that we did but we are powerless against Apple’s absolute control of the iOS platform."

"Barnes & Noble has touted its Nook Color as 'the reader’s tablet' since the product’s inception. But after the company announced the launch of an Android OS update and extended features on the device this week, we’re not sure what to call it anymore.<br />
"E-reader? Tablet? E-tablet?<br />
"Version 1.2 of the Nook Color’s firmware launched Monday morning, bringing Android OS 2.2 (Froyo) to existing users of the e-reader tablet. The software includes expansions to web surfing on the device, including Adobe Flash and Air support, as well as the ability to receive e-mail."<br />
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Interesting.