Telegraph.co.uk

Monday 18 December 2017

Advertisement

Apple to squeeze out Orange as new backer of fiction award

Oranges are not the only fruit, especially when it comes to the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Oranges are not the only fruit, especially when it comes to the Orange Prize for Fiction.
A brand new look to come? Author Madeline Miller with her statuette after winning the Orange Prize this year. Photo: REUTERS/Neil Hall

Apple, the US technology giant behind the iPad and the iPhone, is understood to be looking at backing the prestigious award, which recognises novels written by women.

The prize, which was founded in 1996, has been supported by Orange, the mobile phone operator, since it was launched. However, the firm, which has since merged with T-Mobile to become Everything Everywhere, controversially withdrew its sponsorship in May.

At the time, literary circles joked that Apple or BlackBerry could step into the breach to preserve the fruity theme, and quipped that they wanted to be able to "compare Apples with Oranges". Now, in evidence that life is, if not stranger, then at least as strange as fiction, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that Apple has had talks with the award organisers.

Sources said a number of companies, including Kobo, the ebook producer, had also indicated their interest but that discussions with Apple were the most advanced.

The Cupertino-based company does not generally favour sponsorship deals, instead preferring to cultivate interest in its brands by shrouding product launches in secrecy.

In the past, it has only lent the name of its digital downloads service, iTunes, to an ITV2 music show and a series of concerts known as the iTunes Festival.

It is not clear whether Apple would give its own name to the women's fiction prize, or would name the award after one of its products, such as its iPad device or iBookstore.

Sources at the company said that its potential involvement was likely to result in a "marketing arrangement" that would give the prize prominence in its iBookstore but did not necessarily involve naming rights.

The fact that the firm is in talks at all is a signal of its determination to win more people over to reading ebooks on its iPad, and loosen the stranglehold on the ebooks market that Amazon has established with the Kindle ereader.

Earlier this year, Apple was accused by the US Department of Justice of conspiring with five major book publishers to fix the price of ebooks.

Together, they were accused of engineering the so-called "agency model" of pricing ebooks which allows publishers to dictate the price of any given titles as long as they give 30pc of the revenues direct to the retailer.

Apple denied the collusion charges, and instead said that it was trying to break Amazon's "monopolistic grip" on the ebook market by establishing its iPad as an alternative ereader to the Kindle.

Advertisement

More from the web

Advertisement
Advertisement

More from the web

Loading

Back to top

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2017

Terms and Conditions

Today's News

Archive

Style Book

Weather Forecast
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/electronics/9469226/Apple-to-squeeze-out-Orange-as-new-backer-of-fiction-award.html
www.telegraph.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-51
131127
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DGVPBKB3FQ7BFPK453T42HQE7UGNDGGI
<urn:uuid:345921e2-93c4-4afc-aa2b-51b95a3c36c3>
2017-12-18T21:09:28Z
104.96.220.139
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:32QFGVV2SBF4L3JOIG35OSH3VTWO345Z
<urn:uuid:3d52fa4c-3d89-4ca5-bbf1-c1d84c85d3de>
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/electronics/9469226/Apple-to-squeeze-out-Orange-as-new-backer-of-fiction-award.html
response
<urn:uuid:13bf7afa-59ec-4452-98bb-7b9f829a0605>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-111-184-87.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-51
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf