Amazon.com bows to pricing demands from Macmillan

In today's podcast: Amazon.com bows to pricing demands from Macmillan; Yahoo extends agreement with AP; and Google to reportedly open store for third-party apps.

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After a brief protest, Amazon.com will continue to sell e-book titles from Macmillan despite the publisher's decision to raise prices for e-books. Amazon said it briefly halted sales of e-books from Macmillan for its Kindle e-reader device after learning that Macmillan wanted to charge between US$12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases. Amazon generally chooses to sell new Kindle releases at $9.99. Macmillan, however, wants to change to an "agency model" in which it sets prices for its products

Yahoo has renewed its licensing deal with the Associated Press to post articles from the global wire service on Yahoo Web sites, the companies said on Monday. The AP and Google apparently are having a harder time coming to an agreement to renew their deal, which was announced in August 2006 but signed several months earlier. On Jan. 12, a Google spokesman said via e-mail that Google still had a licensing agreement with the AP but that it had stopped publishing AP stories on Google sites. On Monday, the spokesman said the situation remained the same.

Google may open as early as March an online store to sell third-party software that complements its Google Apps collaboration and communication hosted suite, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Google would let customers purchase the software from its store and charge the third-party developers a commission, according to the Journal, whose article was based on anonymous sources. A Google spokeswoman reached via e-mail declined to comment specifically on the Journal article, but she pointed out that Google already has a site called Solutions Marketplace where it features applications and professional services from third-party developers that complement Google Apps and other Google enterprise products.

More than 300 Web sites are being pestered by infected computers that are part of the Pushdo botnet, according to security researchers. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Twitter and PayPal are among the sites being hit, although it doesn't appear the attacks are designed to knock the sites offline, according to The Shadowserver Foundation, a group that tracks botnets. Shadowserver was tipped off to the Pushdo issue by Joe Stewart, director of malware analysis at vendor SecureWorks.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.