A US judge has found Apple guilty of conspiring with major publishers to fix the price of ebooks and has called for a trial on damages.

District Judge Denise Cote stayed true to her initial impressions of the case, and ruled that Apple had colluded with Macmillan, Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster on digital tome prices when it entered the ebook market with its iPads in 2010.
At the time, Apple - led by its co-founder Steve Jobs who died in 2011 - was competing with tech juggernaut Amazon. The fruity firm's price fixing pushed up costs for readers, and was its attempt to eliminate its rival from the market, the judge said in the ruling.
The beak said:
The Plaintiffs have shown that the Publisher Defendants conspired with each other to eliminate retail price competition in order to raise e-book prices, and that Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy. Without Apple’s orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have succeeded as it did in the Spring of 2010.

At the time, Apple - led by its co-founder Steve Jobs who died in 2011 - was competing with tech juggernaut Amazon. The fruity firm's price fixing pushed up costs for readers, and was its attempt to eliminate its rival from the market, the judge said in the ruling.