"iBooks" Publisher Sues Apple

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Thursday, June 16th, 2011


A publisher, John T. Colby, bought a series of old titles and sold under the name iBooks in since 1999. Around the same time, Apple sold laptops under the iBook name and, more important, began its iBook store in 2010. Colby is stating that Apple has essentially destroyed his business and that:

“Apple’s use of the mark ‘iBooks’ to denote the electronic library that can be accessed via its iPad tablet computer and its iPhone is likely to overwhelm the good will of plaintiffs’ ‘ibooks’ and ‘ipicturebooks’ marks and render them virtually worthless.”

The books include these titles from Byron Preiss, among others.

via Bloomberg