Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Tuesday:

Here Comes Random House: Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) e-bookstore has taken a beating in the market since it opened for business last April. The biggest reason Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s (NYS:BKS) Nook stores have crushed Apple is the absence in Apple’s store of Bertlesman-owned Random House publishing brand and its many imprints. However, Random House said Monday that it has decided to adopt “the agency model for e-book sales,” setting its own prices and giving a commission to e-book vendors rather than leaving it to vendors.

Although Random House hasn’t explicitly said that it will sell titles through Apple’s iBookstore, an announcement will likely be made at the iPad 2 media event on Wednesday. The largest book publisher in the world couldn’t agree with Apple on pricing when the store first opened. Random House had required its vendors to set pricing, something Apple was unwilling to do. This left Apple out in the cold during the iBookstore’s crucial first holiday season, a period when Amazon’s Kindle store saw soaring sales for Random House titles like Steig Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

iPhone 5 Talk: A Monday report from Taiwanese website Tw.apple.pro translated by AppleInsider claims that the next-generation iPhone will feature a sliding cover similar to the kind seen on Motorola’s (NYSE:MMI) Droid phones. The article says previous reports that the iPhone 5 would have a 4-inch display were false and that the new phone will include a sliding screen but doesn’t specify whether it will also house a keyboard. Also mentioned is a “3D screen” for the iPhone, “but not [necessarily] iPhone 5” says the article. Tw.apple.pro has a history of leaking images of legitimate Apple components long before their attendant devices are officially announced to the public.

iPad 1 Phaseout: A Tuesday report at Macrumors said that the original iPad has been deleted from big box retailer Best Buy’s (NYSE: BBY) product database. This news followed a Monday report that third-party retailers of the iPad have been notified of constrained supplies of the tablet. The apparent freeze on iPad shipping suggests that Apple is going to fully replace the original model with the new iPad 2 after it is announced tomorrow. This would be a shift from previous portable device releases from Apple. Older models of iPhone have seen price reductions rather than be discontinued when newer models have been released.

As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.