ParisLemon

I’m not comfortable discussing the contents of that meeting.

Russell Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president for Kindle content, in federal court when asked about a meeting that took place at Jeff Bezos’ Seattle boathouse on Sunday Jan. 24, 2010.

That was a few days before the initial iPad announcement — where, of course, iBooks was also unveiled, kicking off the eBooks situation for which Apple is now on trial.

One important thing noted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

Several readers have asked how a witness under oath could get away with not answering a direct question. You’d be amazed at how much evidence in this case has been redacted because it contained trade secrets, business data, privileged conversations with attorneys etc.. Apparently Apple’s lawyer had been told in advance that there were Amazon lawyers present at the meeting in the boathouse, and he backed off as soon as Grandinetti declined to discuss what was said there.

If Grandinetti won’t talk about it because lawyers were present in the boathouse, that’s just about the worst way possible to phrase that.

Negotiating 101: Steve Jobs Style

Talk about “no compromise”.

iBooks Author 1.01 out with updated EULA

Notes Megan Lavey-Heaton for TUAW:

The change is an important one though, clarifying that Apple has rights over the format a book is in, not the content.

And we have yet another bit of controversy to file away under: Apple Is Not Fucking Stupid.

I haven’t weighed in on the EULA hubbub for this exact reason. If Apple was actually trying to suggest that they own the content of all iBooks published via iBooks Author, then yes, obviously that’s bad. But get this: Apple is neither the devil nor are they fucking stupid — as we’ve seen before.

High-res

Some Key Subtle Details From Apple’s Textbook Event

Push Pop Press And iBooks

John Gruber follows up on Daniel Dilger’s earlier report that Steve Jobs not-so-subtly threatened Push Pop Press if they continued down their eBook path. Turns out, according to Gruber’s source, it wasn’t a threat, it was more of a heads up.

This makes more sense given how closely Push Pop Press worked with Al Gore on Our Choice, their first eBook developed for the iPad. Gore, remember, is a long-time Apple board member and was very close with Jobs.

Remember also that two of Push Pop Press’ founders were Mike Matas, a highly regarded designer at Apple (who actually joined the company when he was just 19), and Kimon Tsinteris, a former senior engineer on Apple’s iPhone team.

I’m sure Apple doesn’t do a lot of “friendly heads-ups”, but if anyone would get one, it’s these guys.

And continuing down that path, it also makes sense that Push Pop Press would get sell to Facebook just a few months after their first launch. They probably could have continued to work with Apple on their titles, but Apple being in the game (with their own format) would seem to shrink the market potential for the company as a whole.

Also interesting, this wasn’t a straight-up talent acquisition by Facebook (which most of their acquisitions are). Facebook owns the Push Pop Press technology. Here’s the key statement from the Push Pop note on the acquisition:

Now we’re taking our publishing technology and everything we’ve learned and are setting off to help design the world’s largest book, Facebook.

Although Facebook isn’t planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it’s going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.

So Push Pop figured out a way to continue to use the amazing technology they invented, but without competing head-on with the still-at-the-time-unannounced new iBooks platform.

iHear iBooks?

The latest version of iBooks apparently has a read-aloud feature — which is awesome. But I wonder: does it work for all books? Wasn’t this a huge issue with the Kindle? I recall loving that feature, then Amazon essentially killed it after publishers complained.

ibooks