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E-Book Antitrust Case Against Apple to Begin

But the evidence in the case will not just determine whether Apple has violated antitrust laws. It will also tell a broader story of how the introduction of e-books created upheaval in the publishing industry — with guest appearances by major players like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and e-mails from the late Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive.

In the case, brought a year ago, the Justice Department accused Apple and five book publishers of conspiring to raise e-book prices. The idea, the government said, was to allow publishers to set their own prices rather than letting retailers do so.

Their motivation, according to the Justice Department, was to defend themselves against Amazon, which was setting the price of most new e-books at $9.99 and becoming increasingly dominant in the market. Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and the Hachette Book Group settled the day that charges were filed; Penguin and Macmillan settled months later.

Complaints by Amazon, which now controls at least 60 percent of the e-book market, are widely believed to have incited the investigation. Amazon declined to comment.

After the lawsuit was filed, the expectation was that e-book prices would drop sharply; the publishers that settled agreed to allow retailers to discount their e-books for two years. But the price drop has still not happened.

A government victory against Apple, which would not involve monetary damages, might also not affect e-book prices.

“Are consumers going to be better off as a result of any government win here?” said Charles E. Elder, an antitrust lawyer at Irell & Manella, which is not involved in the case. “That’s going to have to be seen depending on what happens to book publishing generally. It’s in trouble, and e-books are either the savior or they’re going to hasten the demise of book publishers.”

Apple declined to comment, but has said it has done nothing wrong.

“The e-book case to me is bizarre,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said during an onstage interview at a business conference last week in Southern California. “We’ve done nothing wrong there, and so we’re taking a very principled position of this. We were asked to sign something that says we did do something, and we’re not going to sign something that says we did something we didn’t do. And so we’re going to fight.”

Apple certainly has the money to fight, and a brand to protect, at a time when its stock is sagging and its tax practices and manufacturing processes are under scrutiny. Yet it is bigger than ever — with hundreds of millions of its iPhones and iPads in the hands of customers all over the globe.

The trial, before Judge Denise L. Cote of United States District Court, is expected to feature testimony from chief executives from the five publishers, who will offer a window into their world of fierce price negotiations. But the star witness may well be Mr. Jobs, even though he died in October 2011.

In the case, the government cast Apple as the “ringmaster” of the conspiracy. It said that when the company entered the e-book industry in 2010 with the introduction of the iPad, it wanted to pressure Amazon to raise its prices above its uniform $9.99 for new e-books.

At the time, publishers’ agreements to sell e-books were made under the so-called wholesale model of print books; publishers charged retailers about half the cover price for a book, and the retailers then set their own prices. The government said Mr. Jobs had persuaded publishers to agree to agency pricing, which allowed publishers to set their own prices for e-books, giving Apple a 30 percent commission for books sold in its online store.

The publishers’ contracts with Apple included a “most favored nation” clause, requiring that no other retailer sell e-books for a lower price; if they did, the publisher would have to match the price of the e-book in Apple’s store. That, the Justice Department said, resulted in higher prices that harmed consumers.

F.T.C. Is Said to Begin a New Inquiry on Google

People who have been contacted in connection with the inquiry said that the F.T.C. had begun asking questions about Google’s practices, specifically whether the company was bundling advertising services together in a way that prohibited rivals from competing for the business of advertisers.

The F.T.C. said in December 2007 that it would monitor Google’s practices in that area. At that time, the commission found that Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, an online advertising company that specialized in display ads, was “unlikely to substantially lessen competition.”

“We want to be clear, however,” the F.T.C. wrote at the time, “that we will continue to watch these markets and, should Google engage in unlawful tying or other anticompetitive conduct, the commission intends to act quickly.”

Officials at the F.T.C. and Google declined to comment Friday on the possibility of a new inquiry, which was first reported Thursday evening by Bloomberg News. One person close to the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is in its early stages, said the F.T.C. had not yet contacted Google about a new antitrust inquiry.

Another person who has been briefed on the F.T.C.’s work said that the commissioners themselves had not approved the issuance of subpoenas or civil investigative demands, which would be part of any formal investigation.

The F.T.C. closed an antitrust investigation of Google’s search business less than five months ago, voting unanimously not to proceed with an antitrust case after months of pressure from Google’s rivals.

That investigation focused on how Google’s search engine presented results of consumer queries, and whether the company purposely gave higher rankings and more prominent display to results that featured its own businesses.

In the new inquiry, according to a person in the advertising business who said he was contacted by the F.T.C., commission staff members asked about Google’s practices in providing, or serving, advertisements to customers’ Web sites and about the practices of its Ad Exchange, where companies bid on opportunities to aim at certain consumers with ads.

F.T.C. officials were interested in whether Google was tying one application to another by offering below-cost pricing in exchange for a customer’s guarantee not to buy ads through Google’s competitors, the person said.

At the time it approved the DoubleClick deal, the F.T.C. said it also would monitor issues concerning consumer privacy, including whether the collection of information from one part of Google’s business — for example, its search operation — was being used in its other units to unfairly exploit its size and drive rivals from the market.

In Silicon Valley, Perks Now Begin at Home

Today, Evernote’s 250 employees — every full-time worker, from receptionist to top executive — have their homes cleaned twice a month, free.

It is the latest innovation from Silicon Valley: the employee perk is moving from the office to the home. Facebook gives new parents $4,000 in spending money. Stanford School of Medicine is piloting a project to provide doctors with housecleaning and in-home dinner delivery. Genentech offers take-home dinners and helps employees find last-minute baby sitters when a child is too sick to go to school.

These kinds of benefits are a departure from the upscale cafeteria meals, massages and other services intended to keep employees happy and productive while at work. And the goal is not just to reduce stress for employees, but for their families, too. If the companies succeed, the thinking goes, they will minimize distractions and sources of tension that can inhibit focus and creativity.

Now that technology has allowed work to bleed into home life, it seems that companies are trying to address the impact of home life on work.

There is, of course, the possibility that relieving people of chores at home will simply free them up to work more. But David Lewin, a compensation expert and management professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he viewed the perks as part of a growing effort by American business to reward people with time and peace of mind instead of more traditional financial tools, like stock options and bonuses.

“They’re trying to get at people’s larger lives and sanity,” Mr. Lewin said. “You might call it the bang for the nonbuck.”

At Deloitte, the consulting firm, employees can get a backup care worker if an aging parent or grandparent needs help. The company subsidizes personal trainers and nutritionists, and offers round-the-clock counseling service for help with issues like marital strife and infertility. Deloitte executives, and other experts, said they believe that such benefits were likely to spread.

“The workplace was built on the assumption that there was somebody at home dealing with the home front,” said Anne Weisberg, a longtime human resources executive who helped write a book about new kinds of workplace policies.

Not only is that no longer the case, she said, but the work-life pressures seem to be building. “There’s a greater awareness that we’re pushing things to the limit and something’s got to give,” she said.

Hannah Valantine, a cardiologist, professor and associate dean at the Stanford School of Medicine, said the university’s experiment with helping out at home was part of a broader effort to support doctors, given their hyperkinetic pace of life.

“If you’re coming home at the end of the day exhausted and you have a pile of cleaning to do, it’s the kind of things that leads rapidly to burnout, and burned-out physicians don’t give the best care,” Dr. Valantine said. “We’re trying to send a very strong message that the institution cares about you and about your life.”

Some compensation experts argue these types of perks ultimately do little to attract employees and might obscure more fundamental problems at companies that have trouble retaining talent.

That is a challenge Stanford owns up to, given the brain drain suffered by academic hospitals, where relentless demands include treating patients, writing grants, doing research and traveling to conferences.

So 18 months ago, Stanford hired a consulting firm called Jump Associates to better understand why so many academic doctors feel burned out. The company videotaped them from the time they woke up, through the workday and until they and their families went to sleep.

In one video, a kidney specialist told a story that shocked the researchers: while she was on maternity leave, she bought a minivan to ferry the children of friends and neighbors to school and sports practices.

That way, the doctor explained, she would be able to ask for favors when she returned to work — and that, in theory, would enable her to juggle the dual demands of work and family.

In Silicon Valley, Perks Now Begin at Home

Today, Evernote’s 250 employees — every full-time worker, from receptionist to top executive — have their homes cleaned twice a month, free.

It is the latest innovation from Silicon Valley: the employee perk is moving from the office to the home. Facebook gives new parents $4,000 in spending money. Stanford School of Medicine is piloting a project to provide doctors with housecleaning and in-home dinner delivery. Genentech offers take-home dinners and helps employees find last-minute baby sitters when a child is too sick to go to school.

These kinds of benefits are a departure from the upscale cafeteria meals, massages and other services intended to keep employees happy and productive while at work. And the goal is not just to reduce stress for employees, but for their families, too. If the companies succeed, the thinking goes, they will minimize distractions and sources of tension that can inhibit focus and creativity.

Now that technology has allowed work to bleed into home life, it seems that companies are trying to address the impact of home life on work.

There is, of course, the possibility that relieving people of chores at home will simply free them up to work more. But David Lewin, a compensation expert and management professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he viewed the perks as part of a growing effort by American business to reward people with time and peace of mind instead of more traditional financial tools, like stock options and bonuses.

“They’re trying to get at people’s larger lives and sanity,” Mr. Lewin said. “You might call it the bang for the nonbuck.”

At Deloitte, the consulting firm, employees can get a backup care worker if an aging parent or grandparent needs help. The company subsidizes personal trainers and nutritionists, and offers round-the-clock counseling service for help with issues like marital strife and infertility. Deloitte executives, and other experts, said they believe that such benefits were likely to spread.

“The workplace was built on the assumption that there was somebody at home dealing with the home front,” said Anne Weisberg, a longtime human resources executive who helped write a book about new kinds of workplace policies.

Not only is that no longer the case, she said, but the work-life pressures seem to be building. “There’s a greater awareness that we’re pushing things to the limit and something’s got to give,” she said.

Hannah Valantine, a cardiologist, professor and associate dean at the Stanford School of Medicine, said the university’s experiment with helping out at home was part of a broader effort to support doctors, given their hyperkinetic pace of life.

“If you’re coming home at the end of the day exhausted and you have a pile of cleaning to do, it’s the kind of things that leads rapidly to burnout, and burned-out physicians don’t give the best care,” Dr. Valantine said. “We’re trying to send a very strong message that the institution cares about you and about your life.”

Some compensation experts argue these types of perks ultimately do little to attract employees and might obscure more fundamental problems at companies that have trouble retaining talent.

That is a challenge Stanford owns up to, given the brain drain suffered by academic hospitals, where relentless demands include treating patients, writing grants, doing research and traveling to conferences.

So 18 months ago, Stanford hired a consulting firm called Jump Associates to better understand why so many academic doctors feel burned out. The company videotaped them from the time they woke up, through the workday and until they and their families went to sleep.

In one video, a kidney specialist told a story that shocked the researchers: while she was on maternity leave, she bought a minivan to ferry the children of friends and neighbors to school and sports practices.

That way, the doctor explained, she would be able to ask for favors when she returned to work — and that, in theory, would enable her to juggle the dual demands of work and family.

New iPhone Draws Big Crowds as Sales Begin in Asia-Pacific

KDDI, a Japanese carrier, said that it had already run out of the new phone. In Australia, Telstra reported that online preorders sold out in a record 18 hours and that it was discussing accelerated restocking with Apple.

When the iPhone 5 first went on sale, last Friday in the United States, Apple booked more than 2 million preorders in the first 24 hours, double the first-day sales of the previous model, the iPhone 4S.

An estimated 600 people lined up around the block from the Apple store in central Sydney, the first in the world to hand over an iPhone 5 to a buyer, at 8 a.m. local time Friday (Apple planned to deliver the first preordered phones to U.S. customers later in the day).

The Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, in Brisbane, Australia, for a business forum, was among a crowd of several hundred lining up for an iPhone 5.

“I just feel this impulse, like I want to be part of this big adventure, this big revolution and this advance in technology,” Mr. Wozniak, who stopped working for Apple in the late 1980s, told local television.

Masayoshi Son, president of Softbank, the other of the two Japanese carriers selling the phone, said he was concerned that Apple does not have enough production capacity to meet demand. Softbank and Singapore Telecommunications, also known as SingTel, said demand for the iPhone 5 had exceeded previous offerings from Apple, partly because the new phones could work on 4G networks that offer much faster data speeds.

Samsung Electronics of South Korea, both a rival and a component supplier to Apple, moved to crash the party on the eve of the phone’s debut, saying it planned to add the new device to existing patent lawsuits against the U.S. technology company.

In Singapore, SingTel had booths open selling accessories and staff on hand to help buyers transfer data from their old phones, while in a rainy Tokyo, the lines stretched several blocks.

In Hong Kong, whose proximity to China supports a thriving gray market, small groups of people carrying rucksacks filled with cash waited outside the Apple store hoping to snap up phones for resale.

The introductions of the iPhone 5 were more tightly controlled by Apple than the release of the iPhone 4S in 2010, resulting in a more subdued atmosphere — most of the noise in Hong Kong came from staff members, who outnumbered customers and chanted “iPhone 5, iPhone 5.”

In Sydney, guerrilla marketers grabbed the first dozen or so spots in line, with companies paying staff members to line up for several days in the hope of being photographed and interviewed. But most of those waiting were aficionados already hooked on Apple’s earlier iPhones and iPad tablet computers.

“I feel like if I leave it at home, I go a bit crazy,” James Vohradsky, a 20-year-old student said of his current iPhone. He had been in line for 17 hours with his younger sister “I have to drive back and get it. I can’t do my normal day without it.”

Some analysts expect Apple to sell up to 10 million of the iPhone 5 in the remaining days of September and J.P. Morgan has estimated that the phone release could provide a $3.2 billion boost to the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter.

The new phone has a larger, 4-inch screen and is slimmer and far lighter than the previous model. The iPhone 5 supports faster 4G mobile networks and also comes with a number of software updates, including Apple’s new in-house maps feature.

“It’s thin and light. I’ve used Samsung before, but the operation, the feeling of the iPhone is better,” Wataru Saito said of the iPhone 5. The semiconductor engineer had been waiting line in Tokyo since Thursday afternoon with his suitcase because he had a flight to catch Friday.

Some buyers were not completely happy. The iPhone 5 comes with Apple’s own mapping software; previous models used maps from Google. Kim Tudo, a student at the University of New South Wales who had lined up overnight in Sydney, said he was disappointed that the turn-by-turn navigation feature was not immediately available in Australia.

Apple also did not embed near-field communication technology used to turn cellphones into mobile wallets in the iPhone 5. Mr. Vohradsky, also a student in Sydney, said the lack of mobile payment chip was also “a bit of a letdown.”

The iPhone is Apple’s highest-margin product and accounts for half of its annual revenue. Apple has said it will make initial deliveries of the iPhone 5 on Friday in the United States and most of the major European markets, like France, Germany and Britain. The phone goes on sale next Friday in 22 more countries. Apple plans to sell the new phone in 100 countries by the end of the year.