Apple VP Rushed iBooks Deal While Steve Jobs Was Alive

Apple senior Vice President Eddy Cue told a Manhattan courtroom Thursday that he rushed through the process of making deals with publishers — so that Steve Jobs could unveil the iBooks store on stage while the Apple founder was still alive.

Cue is at the center of an antitrust trial where Apple stands accused of fixing prices of e-books at an artificially high level. Department of Justice prosecutors have described Cue as "the chief ringleader" of a price-fixing effort, a charge he vehemently denied. The five major publishers involved in the lawsuit have all made out-of-court settlements with the DOJ.

But Cue argues he wasn't aware of any price-fixing deals the publishers may have been working on. He was focused on making a deal fast on behalf of his then boss, Steve Jobs.

It was late 2009, and Jobs was "at the end of his life," Cue said. Jobs, battling prostate cancer, would last another year before stepping down from running the company in January 2011; he died in October 2011. Each keynote presentation before then, including the unveiling of the iPad in January 2010, could well have been his last.

"I wanted to get it done in time for [the iPad launch], because that was important for him," Cue told the federal court. He had a couple of months to make the deals, and added that the pressure he felt was "tremendous."

Cue had something to prove: it was he who first insisted to Jobs that the iPad had the potential to be "the best e-reader the market has ever seen," he said. Jobs initially argued against it — but once he relented, he asked Cue to get the iBooks store ready for the January unveiling.

The deal Cue made allowed publishers to set their own prices (as opposed to Amazon, which bought books wholesale and set its own prices.) The government points to a clause in the deal that allowed Apple to lower the price of any given ebook if it was cheaper elsewhere.

This, the DOJ contends, gave the publishers cover to raise the prices of new and bestselling ebooks — and forced Amazon, which had long sold cheaper ebooks, to follow suit. The government has offered several emails from Jobs into the evidence, as has Apple. The case continues next week.

Source : mashable