What’s Apple Building in There?

Publishing types have been buzzing all week about Adam L. Penenberg‘s long Fast Company article about Amazon.com, Inc. and the future of the book.

The article explores the company’s $9.99 pricing structure for many Kindle books, an arrangement that reportedly creates a loss for Amazon as publishers are “earning between $12 and $13 per e-book.” Despite the Amazon-centric focus, this GalleyCat editor spotted a nugget of Apple intelligence, as Penenberg examined the company’s patent for a tablet device and an intriguing screen design–another of the fabled “Kindle-killers.”

Here’s more from the article: “a recent patent application, listing as lead inventors Steve Hotelling, the man behind Apple’s multitouch-screen patents for the iPhone, and Jonathan Ive, [Steve Jobs]‘s design guru, includes a multitouch e-book technology. U.S. patent application No. 20080204426 (‘Gestures for Touch Sensitive Input Devices’) describes a method to ‘simulate a finger turning the page in an actual paper-bound book.’”

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