According to the NYT’s Bits blog, Amazon has pulled Macmillan e-books due to a dispute over pricing, with Amazon wanting to hold the line at $9.99 and Macmillan wanting to raise it to an Apple iPad iBooks-like $14.99.

Eerily similar to Apple and iTunes Music, where Steve Jobs resisted the music industries desire to raise prices from $0.99 a song, and finally came to an agreement for flexible pricing up to $1.29 in exchange for DRM-free 3G downloads in January 2009. Previous to the change, Amazon was able to use music industry dissatisfaction to offer DRM-free Amazon MP3 music at $0.89. The industry was willing to take the loss in an attempt to break Apple’s control, and now it looks like their hoping similar pressure and competition from Apple’s iBooks will break down Amazon.

Ironic, poetic? Here’s where it stands:

Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same "agency" model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the retailer. Macmillan said Amazon could continue to buy e-books under its current wholesale model, paying the publisher 50 percent of the hardcover list price while pricing the e-book at any level Amazon chooses, but that Macmillan would delay those e-book editions by seven months after hardcover release. Amazon's removal of Macmillan titles on Friday appears to be a direct reaction to that.

And here we thought when there was competition, prices were supposed to go down…

[Note: Amazon has merely stopped selling the e-books for now, they haven't remote-wiped any that were already purchased, the above graphic is entirely satirical!]

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Apple vs. Amazon vs. Macmillian — Begun These e-Book Wars Have?

Redmond Pie has a nifty tutorial up for those who want to give their Jailbroken iPhone and/or iPod touch an iPad look-and-feel (or just a hint of iPhone 3.2!). Here’s what you need:

• Winterboard
• "Simple iPad Theme"
• MakeItMine app
• Shrink app
• ProSwitcher
• NYTimes app
• Classics app
• Kindle app

Making your old device look like an unreleased new device is hallmark of the hacking community (hey, I had the marimba ringtone and iPhone theme on my Treo 680 for months!), so if you want to get your iPad on, check out Redmond Pie and the video after the break!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

How-to: Make Your Jailbroken iPhone Look Like an iPad

Engadget has been getting tips from deep code divers who are exploring Apple’s latest iPhone 3.2 SDK for the iPad and what they’re finding includes code/hooks for iChat-style video Calling, file downloads from Mobile Safari, support for telephony like SMS and calls, and some prototype support for a “handwriting keyboard”. The video conferencing news is especially intriguing:

We’re told that there are hooks to accept and decline a video conference, flip a video feed (which suggests a front-facing camera) and — most importantly — run the video call in either full screen mode or in just a portion of the screen. That means you’ll be able to chat and do other things at the same time, which could mean there’s at least some type of multitasking going on here.

Could this be another example of the iPad being “unfinished“, or of Apple removing a camera at the last minute — like the iPod touch G3 — because they couldn’t get an implementation that was good enough in time for the big reveal?

Looks like there’s some good news (or good speculation at least) for iPhone owners as well, since the devices all share the same OS code base:

chpwn also tells us [...] both the new landscape orientation for the homescreen and keyboard support appear to be destined for the iPhone itself when 3.2 comes out.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3.2 SDK on iPad — iChat Video Calling, File Downloads, Telephony Support, Handwriting Keyboard… And Coming to iPhone?

And 9to5mac finally puts to bed the does-iPad-support-Flash flood they kicked off yesterday by noting Apple and their advertising agency have updated promotional videos and images on Apple.com to properly reflect the lack of Adobe Flash support on the iPad, including the blue lego bricks of plugin fail we iPhone users are so used to.

As we were told by our source at the secretive organization, Apple came crashing down on them with urgent requests to change the video.

In other no-Flash-on-the-iPad news, TheFlashBlog has removed the lone porn fail image from their condemnation graphic, while Merlin Mann at Kung Fu Grippe [via Daring Fireball] points out that if the graphic had been in Flash rather than a JPG, no iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch owner would have seen it anyway… (Or would they, as Gruber updates to pass on that the site in question has an iPhone version that replaces the Flash with QuickTime. D’oh!)

Thus ends the latest flare up in the never ending Flash on iPhone OS saga. Right?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Apple iPad Promotional Material Updated to Remove Flash Content, Adobe iPad Porn Fail Removed from TheFlashBlog