Stefan Mileschin

Apple's reality distortion field is taking a battering after the US Justice Department has said that it ran a price fixing cartel with publishers on its ebooks.

Jobs' Mob has insisted that it has not broken the law, which resulted in many of its loyal customers having to pay much more for e-books.

It insists that since Steve Jobs brokered the deal, it must be perfect, innovative and handy for users. He was a genius, of course, and would never exploit his customers in any way at all.

According to Reuters, already two publishers in Jobs' cartel have panicked and settled to make the coppers go away, but it looks like Apple and a couple of its mates are preparing to copy Microsoft and try and slug it out in court.

It is not clear who has folded but the Justice Department is investigating alleged price-fixing by Apple, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and Pearson and Macmillan.

Apple cut the deals two years ago when the consumer electronics maker launched its iPad tablet computer.

The publishers shifted to a model that allowed them to set the price of e-books and give Apple a 30 percent cut of sales. The move was designed to give Amazon a good kicking but meant that iPad users had to pay more for their books than anyone else.

The DoJ had been trying to eliminate Apple's so-called "most favored nation" status, which had prevented the publishers from selling lower-priced e-books through rival retailers such as Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

However, Apple refused, presumably on religious grounds. It was one of the decisions that Jobs was proud of and even bragged about it.

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