Communications Technology

With the iPad’s launch just days away, several publishers will begin setting e-book prices on Amazon.com starting Thursday, according to published reports.

CBS’ Simon & Schuster and News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers have struck deals with Amazon.com to determine their own prices for electronic titles, according to The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek reports. Additionally, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and Penguin Group will begin setting their own prices on Thursday, according to a Sony letter cited by BusinessWeek.

Most e-books will cost between $12.99 and $14.99, with some newer titles priced at $19.99, higher than Amazon’s $9.99 standard, according to the reports.

The pricing model appears to mirror an announcement made earlier this year with Macmillan after a public dispute over e-book pricing with Amazon. Book publishers had asked Amazon to increase the price of e-books on its Web site, but Amazon stood firm in its contention that anything above $9.99 was too high. Amazon eventually relented after many popular Macmillan titles disappeared from the e-tailer’s site.

“Our digital future is more assured today than it was two months ago,” Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers, told the Journal, adding that the deal followed a month of negotiations.

Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The shift comes just days before Apple is scheduled to begin shipping its iPad touch-screen tablet computer, which will enable users to read e-books, as well as surf the Web, play games, and watch videos. Apple had been rumored to be in secret negotiations with publishers for a deal with similar price points for e-books on the iPad, which may help give publishers more influence over how their books are priced.

Amazon currently controls about 90 percent of the e-book market. However, that market share is expected to dip to 72 percent this year and to 35 percent by 2015, according to Credit Suisse.

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According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is planning two new iPhones: one that could hit the market this summer, and a second that could land on Verizon Wireless.

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., a Taiwanese manufacturer, is said to be building one of the iPhones, while a second manufacturer, Pegatron Technology Group, is manufacturing a second iPhone with a CDMA radio that would support Verizon Wireless’ network.

According to The Wall Street Journal’s sources, the latter iPhone could be in mass production as soon as September.

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It seems like creative shooting modes are popular on this year’s compact cameras. For example, though Canon has long given its cameras controls for playing with colors, this year it’s just gone and added a handful of simple point-and-shoot options for getting more unusual results. One of them, Miniature Effect, applies a selective focus to scenes making full-size, real-life subjects look like miniature models.

The effect is similar to tilt-shift photography. Canon doesn’t call it that, though, probably because those words don’t mean much to most snapshot photographers and because it’s all being done digitally.

Using the mode is easy; it’s really just a matter of deciding where you want to focus and then taking the picture. You can then move the box up and down in the frame to select what’s focused on. What’s in the box is in sharp focus, everything above and below gets blurred. Contrast and saturation are also heightened. The results are also better if your scenes already have a lot of contrast and color, you’re shooting from an elevated location, and your photo is of an entire scene, not a single subject.

You can get the same effect with some basic Photoshop but this mode brings it to the masses and makes the photos ready to share straight from the camera. The mode is available on the SD1400 IS, SX210 IS, and SD3500 IS.

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