Book News: Apple CEO Ordered To Testify In E-Book Price Fixing Case

Posted: March 14, 2013

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Apple CEO Tim Cook has been ordered by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote to testify in the Justice Department's antitrust case over alleged price fixing. Last year, the DOJ filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and five major publishers — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan – of conspiring to fix e-book prices. The publishers all chose to settle. The trial is scheduled to start in June.
• When Middle C author William H. Gass was asked the question "What is something you always carry with you?" by The Daily Beast, he answered, "Grudges" in a rather crotchety interview Wednesday. Let's hope he doesn't read NPR contributor John Freeman's review of his latest book.
• Claire Vaye Watkins beat out Junot Diaz for the Story Prize on Wednesday. Watkins is the author of Battleborn, a short story collection — and the daughter of Paul Watkins, of Manson Family fame.
• In other prize news, the U.K.'s Folio Society will sponsor a literary award worth 40,000 pounds that is expected to compete with the Booker Prize. But, unlike the Booker, this prize will be open to Americans.
• Alisa Sniderman, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, argues in favor of reading Vladimir Nabokov apolitically: "History does lurk in the wings of Nabokov's fiction, but he never gives it center stage." (Although he did once say, charmingly, in a Paris Review interview, "It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.")
• You can now enjamb your tweets.

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