The Digital Reader

A legal fight broke out this week which could potentially affect the entire ebook  industry. Mashable is reporting that Kno, the digital textbook seller, is suing one of their publishing partners for breach of contract.

The story is somewhat complicated (and I don’t think we have all the details), but it boils down to this. A couple months back Kno added a new feature to its app. The Journal collates all of a student’s notes and highlights from a textbook into one accessible file. Cengage objected to this and gave Kno 30 days to disable the Journal. Cengage called it copyright infringement, and when the 30 days was up they pulled their textbooks from Kno’s ebookstore.

Actually, it would be better to say that Cengage tried to pull their textbooks; Kno is still selling them while suing for breach of contract. Yes, the ebookstore is suing the publisher, not the other way around.

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Do you recall all those lawsuits filed against the Price Fix 6 months ago? It turns out that the lawsuits aren’t just opportunistic lawyers going after an easy kill; recent court filings have revealed that at least 2 of the law firms have sources inside the publishing industry. According to briefs filed this week, those sources have revealed that there actually was a conspiracy to fix prices.

And the plot thickens.

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It looks like Kobo wanted to tie up all loose ends before being bought by Rakuten earlier this week; they’ve worked out a settlement with Muhammad Ali over the trademark unpleasantness from this summer.

You might recall that back in July Muhammad Ali enterprises sued Kobo over a full page ad that they took out in the NYTimes. Kobo had used Ali’s name and slogan to promote the new Kobo Touch when they launched the e-reader back in June. His name was prominently featured below his iconic saying “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”, which naturally did not please Mr. Ali.

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The Author’s Guild has joined forces today with their Canadian and Australian counterparts to use the HaithiTrust, a non-for-profit coalition of universities. The AG also signed up 8 authors to act as a lightening rod and injured party.

Normally I would like to write a long and detailed post, but this one looks to be fairly straightforward and simple. It’s another “Google Books” type of lawsuit. The AG is suing to stop the universities from scanning and digitizing their archives. Actually, it looks like this _is_ another Google Books lawsuit; the HaithiTrust was organized in order to form a partnership so Google could scan the collected archives.

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Another anti-trust lawsuit has been filed to day, which now makes (I believe) 4 lawsuits in process in various parts of the US. ( Can you believe that it’s only been 2 weeks since the first lawsuit was filed?)

Like the others, this is a class-action suit. It was filed by Finkelstein Thompson and it goes after all of the Big 6 publishers (and Apple). There’s no word on the  umber of defendants but it looks like Finkelstein Thompson have decided to complicate the issue by also suing  under anti-trust laws for the states of CA and MD as well as under federal laws. That could get interesting.

But other than as a technical matter, this really isn’t all that interesting. These lawsuits won’t settle anything in any reasonable amount of time.

Remember, the Google Books lawsuit is still going on after 6 years. If this suit is resolved in less than that then I will be terribly surprised. In fact, I ;ve said it before but it bears repeating. By the time this lawsuit is settled, the ebook market will have changed enough that the settlement will look a little ridiculous as well as irrelevant.

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