Apple eBook Price Fixing Trial Begins

Defense lawyers point out no market newcomer's ever been charged with anticompetitive practicses before

Apple conspired with publishers to increase ebooks prices, costing readers "hundreds of millions of dollars", an antitrust trial heard yesterday.

In opening arguments reported by Reuters and others, Lawrence Buterman, a lawyer at the US Department of Justice, claimed Apple offered publishers a means to raise their prices from the low figures they were forced to accept with web bookseller Amazon.