Recently, I heard lots of news about ebooks from time to time, I'm curious how is ebooks going on.

In the early April, the U.S. accused Apple Inc. and five of the nation's largest publishers of conspiring to raise e-book prices, in a case that could radically reorder the fast-growing business. This lawsuit is over the firms' move to the agency model where publishers rather than sellers set prices. The five publishers and Apple hatched an arrangement that lifted the price of many best-selling e-books to $12.99 or $14.99, to prevent Amazon.com from building and strengthening a monopolistic hold on the eBook sales market, according to the suit.

Whether Apple will remain in the bookselling business if it is forced to match Amazon's discounted prices or physical book prices have been artificially low all these years is not what I'm going to discuss. What I need to see is that anomaly addressed in some manner. If that can be addressed satisfactorily within the scope of an agency model for eBook pricing, then I am all for it. I understand that it is a hard work for independent authors to write a book and the book should be sold in a reasonable price, neither too low for reducing the writer's remuneration nor too high for breaking out customers' wallet, whatever mode.

Then in the end of April, Microsoft Makes $300M Investment In New Barnes & Noble Subsidiary To Battle With Amazon And Apple In E-books. The new company, referred to for the moment as Newco, will contain B&N's digital business, as well as its College division. While Microsoft will take 17.6 percent, B&N will own 82.4 percent of the venture. And the news leaves a load of questions about what B&N will do next with the Nook, which is currently built on a forked version of Google's Android platform.

In my mind, I don't really very like Nook. In these news, Amazon Kindle seems to be hit by Apple, Barnes & Noble and Microsoft, I prefer to support Kindle. The Kindle is truly wireless: no matter where it is in my house, I can download lots of free books from Project Gutenberg or manybooks.net/ and send an eBook that strikes my fancy to my Kindle for later reading. I can't do that with my Nook. Even though Kindle doesn't support ePub format, it doesn't matter, I can convert ePub to AZW for free with Calibre. The freeware can handle conversion to and from a wide range of formats, including converting ePub to Kindle format.

In addition, in May 22, GPO is extending the reach of its Federal e-books program through a new partnership with Barnes & Noble to make its books available in e-book format for the Nook eReader, which will make the ebooks competition more intense.

In a word, whatever happen, it turns out something unknown will come out in the ebooks industry in the near future. I predict we will see some exciting times.