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

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.")

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