Some development in the e-book price war being played out in Europe -- and an indirect victory for Amazon and any other retailer not called Apple in the process: the European Commission has announced that Apple and the four big publishers Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have offered to drop their agency pricing agreement for e-books sold in Europe -- although the five still "do not agree" with the European Commission's preliminary assessment that those deals were anticompetitive in the first place.