“IT’S getting dead murky, isn’t it?” says a detective in the “Red Riding” crime trilogy, a voyage into the decaying heart of Northern England in the 1970s and ’80s. This adaptation of three novels of the four-book series by the Yorkshire-born writer David Peace is an ambitious endeavor: it is shot by three directors, shares characters (though the protagonists shift) and mingles invention and fact. Like David Fincher’s 2007 serial-killer drama “Zodiac,” the “Red Riding” films are more about capturing an era than solving a mystery.

“Certain crimes allow you to examine a particular time and place,” Mr. Peace said when reached by telephone in West Yorkshire. He was speaking of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, in which a man named Peter Sutcliffe was jailed in 1981 for the deaths of 13 women over five years in Yorkshire and neighboring counties and whose crimes inspire the atmosphere and the events in Mr. Peace’s books and their three-part adaptation.

“What I was trying to figure out,” Mr. Peace continued, “was why did this happen here, and was there something in the way we behaved that made us somehow culpable? Or were we very unfortunate, that here was this evil man?”

The “Red Riding” trilogy, which opens Friday at the IFC Center but had its premiere last March on British television, conjures life in a benighted world of corrupt police and missing children, of weird secrets and guilt-ridden romance.

Eddie Dunford, the brash, callow reporter played by Andrew Garfield in the first of the three films, “Red Riding: 1974,” is only the first to question the established disorder. In the second, “Red Riding: 1980,” a detective (Paddy Considine) from Manchester is assigned to review the Ripper investigation, while “1983” tracks a feckless lawyer (Mark Addy) and a wavering cop (David Morrissey) in the aftermath.

The hellish experiences of these four characters are rendered through an unusual experiment in comparative style: each picture had its own director. Julian Jarrold, who shot “1974” on Super 16, creates a twisted noir and fuguelike atmosphere to depict Dunford’s investigation and doomed romance with a victim’s mother (Rebecca Hall).

On the telephone from London Mr. Jarrold, who also adapted “Brideshead Revisited” and “Crime and Punishment,” said that for one shot he told his director of photography “to come back with a ‘Lost Highway’ shot,” referring to David Lynch’s twisted and textured 1997 film.

Shot in Leeds, “1974” and its follow-ups delve into the notoriety of “the North” against a backdrop of block houses, humble sitting rooms, nuclear power plants, offices and pubs. The Northern creed and manner — tough and often humorously blunt — are epitomized in the films by the police and their allies. (According to the films’ screenwriter, Tony Grisoni, it’s all analogous to “what Jacobean English dramatists thought of Sicily.”)

The casts’ British stalwarts include Warren Clarke (once a droog in “A Clockwork Orange”) as a stonewalling police chief, Sean Bean as a cocksure developer, and Mr. Morrissey (who played Gordon Brown in “The Deal”).

“In Northern England it was quite grim, quite hard,” said Mr. Morrissey, who grew up in Liverpool in the ’70s. “There was a very white, working-class male world, which was very insular, and it was a very violent place.”

Mr. Morrissey, who stars in “1983” but appears in all three films, recalled the specter that seemed to hang over those years: “There was a sense that one world was closing and the other one was not ready to open.”

Because of budgetary restraints (all three films were done for a lean $9 million), the book that deals most directly with the Ripper, “Nineteen Seventy-Seven” was not filmed. But the haunting presence of the crimes feeds into the dread of “Red Riding: 1980,” which focuses on Peter Hunter (Mr. Considine), a Manchester detective who is investigating the local handling of the case. A creeping paranoia becomes the film’s dominant mood as Hunter’s inquiry is thwarted through misdirection and violence; meager solace comes from a wistful affair with a colleague.

Seeking to offset the nebulous threats working against the protagonist, the director, James Marsh, chose a clean, wide-screen look for this involuted middle story, shooting on 35 millimeter.

“I felt that Peter’s character was a very straight arrow, and I wanted the film to be really clear,” Mr. Marsh said in an interview in Manhattan.

Mr. Marsh is best known for the Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire,” but he also made “Wisconsin Death Trip,” which examined a Midwest town struck by myriad tragedies at the end of the 19th century. His “Red Riding” opens with an audiovisual overture of actual and fabricated radio and television reports of the crimes combined with recreated photos of victims.

(Mr. Peace, 43, who came of age at the height of the investigation into the Yorkshire murders, recalls the efforts to solicit the help of ordinary citizens: “They set up temporary sheds in every bus station where you could go in and listen to tape recordings of what they thought was the Ripper’s voice.”)

The unsolved killings in “Red Riding” and the portrait of Northern masculinity, brutality and corruption suggest a terrible sins-of-the-father burden borne by a beleaguered society. The full scope of the institutional rot always seems just out of reach, as if — in Mr. Grisoni words — “you’re seeing a tiny fraction, in the same way a child would.”

For the conclusion of the grim saga, “1983,” its director, Anand Tucker, used a Red One digital camera and introduces golden sunshine and a lighter touch. But horrific secrets still emerge in this story about a struggling lawyer (Mr. Addy) and a police officer (Mr. Morrissey), who grows shocked by the unsavory sides of his colleague’s extracurricular endeavors.

“I wanted an anti-noir, a light noir,” said Mr. Tucker, who made the homicide-free “Shopgirl” and “Leap Year.” “It’s two characters struggling to find the light, to find some hope or redemption.”

Taken together these varied visual formats and the ambitious historical canvas lend a cinematic scope that belies the trilogy’s original broadcast in three installments on Channel 4 in Britain. Andrew Eaton, its producer for Revolution Films, confirmed in an interview that theatrical distribution was always their ambition. For the American release IFC Films plans, at least initially, to release all 305 minutes of the films as “Red Riding: Special Roadshow Edition” with two intermissions, though they will also be available individually through video-on-demand.

The trilogy has already found interest from the director Ridley Scott for an American remake, which sounds like an unusual bit of cultural transposition until you learn that Mr. Peace himself wrote the source novels while abroad. From 1994 until recently he lived in Japan and taught English while writing.

Some inspiration for his “Red Riding” quartet came from the case of child killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, who was sentenced in 1997 and later executed for a series of grotesque murders, and Mr. Peace also recalls going to “Se7en” and “Zodiac” during his stay. It was also in Japan that he wrote other North-set novels, including “The Damned United”(which was adapted for film last fall) and “GB84” (awaiting production).

“I wrote six books, all about West Yorkshire,” Mr. Peace said, who has since returned to his storied hometown to be close to family. “It must have been a kind of homesickness. Although the West Yorkshire tourist board are not as proud of the Red Riding books.”

Short of landing in a flying saucer and having a tablet teleported into his hands, there was no way that Steve Jobs could have lived up to the hype before last Wednesday’s iPadannouncement.

But he came pretty close. By the time the bells, whooshes and clicks died down, I couldn’t say the future had arrived, but I’m pretty sure we can see it from here.

“It was like someone came back from five years into the future and handed this to us,” said John Gruber of Daring Fireball, a respected tech blog.

The iPad’s promise was hinted at before Mr. Jobs hit the stage. The set was dominated by a large, comfy chair. Since the birth of the personal computer, we have been hunched over, squinting at screens — great big terminals, laptop displays, tiny screens on PDAs. With the iPad, the screen has come to us as we lean back in ease.

Critics who suggested that Apple unveiled little more than an iPhone that won’t fit in your pocket don’t seem to understand that by scaling the iPhone experience, the iPad becomes a different species. Media companies now have a new platform that presents content in an intimate way.

“Looking at it through the lens of whether or not it has new features and applications misses the point,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “It is nine times larger than an iPhone, and that is fundamentally a new application.”

That application isn’t work, not without a keyboard (touch-typing with all fingers on a virtual keyboard is miserable) or a camera. This is a device for consuming media, not creating it. So are the media providers ready to deliver?

Yes and, sadly, no. The iPad’s glories as a media consumption device open up a whole new frontier for developers and publishers. But they also raise large questions about the business models that will drive that content to the screen.

For gaming, the iPad manages to be both a remarkable display device and a large, engaging controller, and the App Store from the iPhone should accommodate a new generation of games played on a bigger field. But when it comes to other dynamic media like television and movies, the iPad is running into the familiar trouble.

Apple has limited agreements with movie studios, so movies received very little play last Wednesday. The movie “Up,” a fancy piece of software produced by Pixar, looked great during the presentation, but most studios have yet to come to terms with how their work will be monetized and displayed on the iPad.

The iPad won’t play Flash, the Adobe software which powers a great deal of animation and interactivity on the Web, so for the time being, iPad’s utility as a surfing device is significantly compromised. You can’t, for example, watch Hulu, the popular site that offers a free buffet of network TV shows.

Apple and many others have problems with Adobe’s Flash because they don’t control it, but it also means that people who want to see those shows on their iPad will have to pay for them on iTunes rather than watch them free on Hulu. (And according to The Financial Times, just before Apple introduced the iPad, the company pressed television studios to cut the iTunes prices for their programs in half.)

Of all media, books had the most real estate in the presentation — with good reason. The reading interface on the iPad is almost as sexy as the gaming, with no waiting for e-ink or pages to load. Readers can literally page through books in an interface that replicates the tactile romance of reading. And the forthcoming iBooks marketplace means that Amazon no longer has absolute authority on the price of electronic books (an authority Amazon tried to impose on Friday by refusing to sell books from Macmillan after the publisher insisted on pricing similar to the iPad; Amazon backed down Sunday night, saying it would “capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms.”)

But the book industry seems ill-prepared to take advantage of many of the new worlds the iPad opens up. Although five of the top six publishers signed on, there was little indication that they would use some of the muscle the device displays. Readers on the iPad should certainly expect that when they buy a cookbook, building in cooking demos would be a no-brainer, but it may be a long while before the industry has the ability to produce books that incorporate multimedia.

Newspapers and magazines will have far less trouble changing the wheels on the car as it goes flying down new roads. Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations at The New York Times, took a turn on the Apple stage with a demonstration that displayed the new flexibility and range of the iPad.

But many people could not help but notice that no magazine companies were involved in Wednesday’s presentation. “I saw iBooks today, but no iMagazine,” said Sara Ohrvall of Sweden’s Bonnier Corporation, which owns a number of American magazines. And many magazine companies have been working on prototype applications for a device that would seem to be a dream come true.

Writing on the Pentagram blog, the designer Luke Hayman said the iPad will “revolutionize the way we read magazines.” (Tell that to Condé Nast, which just put the finishing touches on a prototype of a gorgeous digital magazine — in Flash.)

But there’s a sticking point here, too. The consumer side of both newspapers and magazines is in the database business, trying to expand their base of credit cards and information about consumers. In a world of applications, a share of the revenue will go to publishers, but the information about customers mostly belongs to Apple. The big question for publishers is, will Apple allow them to develop their own relationship with the consumer?

Despite that doubt, Terry McDonell, editor of Sports Illustrated, liked what he saw, in part because the product that was unveiled fit nicely with a prototype that the magazine has developed.

“I saw the Mac demo’ed by Steve Jobs in 1984 in the offices of Newsweek, and I knew at the moment it was going to change everything because of its capabilities for desktop publishing,” he said. “I felt the same way watching this presentation. There are huge potential gains for us here.”

Even as business models have yet to evolve, the iPad is clearly a next-generation media consumption device. The iPad is less gadget than pure frame on content. During the hands-on demo, I was so intent on what was on the screen that I all but forgot I was holding a piece of technology.

A lot of things are clearer in this gorgeous new environment, except that part about turning the iPad into a cash register for media companies.

After a weekend of brinksmanship, Amazon.com on Sunday surrendered to a publisher and agreed to raise prices on some electronic books.

Amazon shocked the publishing world late last week by removing direct access to the Kindle editions as well as printed books from Macmillan, one of the country’s six largest publishers, which had said it planned to begin setting higher consumer prices for e-books. Until now, Amazon has set e-book prices itself, with $9.99 as the default for new releases and best sellers.

But in a statement Sunday afternoon, Amazon said it would accept Macmillan’s decision.

On Friday, Amazon removed “buy” buttons from thousands of titles published by Macmillan, including recent best sellers like “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel and “The Gathering Storm,” by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Customers who wanted to buy print editions could do so only from third-party sellers. Digital editions made for Amazon’s Kindle device disappeared.

In a strongly worded message on its Web site on Sunday, Amazon said that while it disagreed with Macmillan’s stance, it would bow to the publisher’s plan.

“We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles,” Amazon said. “We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”

The face-off had set the already anxious publishing industry on edge. “I think everyone thought they were witnessing a knife fight,” said Sloan Harris, co-director of the literary department at International Creative Management. “And it looks like we’ve gone to the nukes.”

As of Sunday evening, the “buy” buttons had not yet been restored to Macmillan titles on Amazon. In a statement to Publishers Marketplace, an online industry newsletter, John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, said: “We are in discussions with Amazon on how best to resolve our differences. They are now, have been, and I suspect always will be one of our most valued customers.”

Under Macmillan’s new terms, which take effect at the beginning of March, the publisher will set the consumer price of each book and the online retailer will serve as an agent and take a 30 percent commission. E-book editions of most newly released adult general fiction and nonfiction will cost $12.99 to $14.99.

Those terms mirror conditions that five of the six largest publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster — agreed to with Apple last week for e-books sold via the iBookstore for the iPad.

For more than a year, publishers have been fretting about the price of digital books, which Amazon, as the dominant player in the fast-growing market, had effectively been able to set.

Last Thursday, Mr. Sargent flew to Seattle to explain the pricing and new sales model to Amazon. He said Amazon could continue to buy e-books on the same terms it does now — allowing the retailer to set consumer prices — but that the publisher would delay the release of all digital editions by several months after the hardcover publication.

Amazon buys and resells e-books in the same way it handles printed books, by paying publishers a wholesale price that is generally equivalent to half the list price of a print edition. Because Amazon has discounted the price of most new and popular e-books on its Kindle e-reader to $9.99, it loses money on most of those sales.

Amazon’s goal has been strategic: it aims to establish a low price for e-books that will have the ancillary benefit of helping it sell more Kindle devices.

Amazon’s decision is also a victory for Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, who first pitched the idea of selling e-books under the agency model to book publishers earlier this year. Now Apple, whose iPad tablet is due in March, can compete on fairly equal footing with Amazon.

Book publishers, meanwhile, are volunteering to limit their digital profits. In the model that Amazon prefers, publishers typically collect $12.50 to $17.50 for new e-books. Under the new agency model, publishers will typically make $9 to $10.50 on new digital editions.

Apple’s stance in allowing publishers to set their own e-book prices (albeit within a limited range) is also a bit of a reversal. That is precisely the kind of arrangement it declined to offer TV networks and music labels, which have long railed against the 99-cent price of songs in iTunes.

Analysts say Amazon, which accounts for 15 to 20 percent of domestic book sales, probably realized it could not compete with Apple if it wasn’t offering the same range of content. “Amazon figured out pretty quickly that this was a battle they could not win,” said Mike Shatzkin, the chief of the Idea Logical Company, a consultant to publishers.

Amazon may still hope to play one asset to its advantage. Loyal Kindle users routinely give low ratings to books they perceive as too costly, or whose digital editions are delayed past the publication of the hardcover edition. These consumers could ostensibly reject costlier e-books.

Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at the Book Review.