On the third day of the e-book trial brought by the Department of Justice against Apple, the judge heard from an Amazon executive who claimed that Apple's proposal of a shift to the "agency model" of e-book pricing (where publishers set the price rather than retailers) was intended to hurt sales of Amazon's Kindle e-reader and its success as a seller of e-books. Judge Denice Cote, who is conducting the bench trial, also heard from Apple lawyers that the length of negotiations and differences in the contracts it had with publishers prove that it did not collude to set prices.
