It is reported that after months of investigation of pricing collusion between Apple and electronic book publishers, the Justice Department is negotiating with publishers about possible solutions and is likely to file a lawsuit.
Antitrust officials have got down to investigating whether Apple and the five publishers has ever agreed to work together to raise the price of electronic books. A day earlier, the competition committee of the European Union said that it was carrying on an investigation of Apple and five publishers over whether they had made illegal agreements to restrict pricing on e-books.
Sharis A. Pozen, the acting director of antitrust division of the Justice Department set up a subcommittee to look into the electronic book industry in December. Ms.Pozen plans to leave Justice at the end of April. One person close to the investigation who has no authority to discuss the case in public but said that the department was hoping to reach a decision before she departed on whether to file a lawsuit against five publishers if a settlement was not reached by then.
When Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, Apple turned e-book selling into a so-called agency model, where the publisher sets the price and Apple takes a 30 percent cut. That was totally different from Amazon's strategy, where it bought books from publishers at nearly half the cover price and then set its own retail price, often offering sharp discounts.
While Apple told publishers that it was impossible for them to sell their e-books more cheaply elsewhere. Therefore, It leads to have the Justice Department believe that the publishers and Apple worked together to raise prices. According to the Journal, the companied denied the fact and European antitrust regulators are conducting a similar investigation.

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Distributors Tell You Which Electronic Component Is in Shortage

Affected by current economic circumstance, the demand for product in stock is reducing. Now it's basically oversupply in  electronic component market  . But there is also partly shortage of some products. On one hand, the inventories of original manufacturers and agents are continuously reducing; on the other hand, wafer factories reduce the output thinking of the bad situation. So below are some analyses from the distributors.

Some power supply components may face the situation of extensive deliver time and shortage of goods because of full production capacity of upstream wafer OEM/ODM. Some optical components relating with broadcast communication equipment will most likely face the issue of supply tension. Some high-end components' most suppliers are still foreign enterprise and many domestic enterprises might not respond enough quickly to the latest domestic policies' changes.

In smartphone industry, technology's development results in the changes of some customers' design requirement. It may take some time in integrating product kinds. Also the uncertainty of customers' requirement might still exist. Some polymer capacitors and thin-film capacitors' supply may be a little tense resulted by extreme weather.

Hot Smartphones market leads the related downstream resources 'tense supply like capacitance touch control IC whose forecast and actual order are increased by double times and even several times in same period.

NXP's changing factory leads the shortage materials of SOT353/SOT363. The production problem of MMA8450 chip of Freescale? Semiconductor makes many manufacturers change to the replacing type of MMA7660, as a result MMA7660 is in shortage momently.

For now, it's unavoidable for the shortage of domestic components. The original manufacturers want to increase inventories but Foundry's production capacity is limited. This contradiction will become more and more obvious when market demands'increase.

Part of components 'tense are mainly caused by customers' concentrating using of some major advising type, which results in the lack of original factories' storage and the strain supply in a short time.

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