E-bookgate
The Department of Justice has filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. The Attorney General said:
As a result of this alleged conspiracy, we believe that consumers paid millions of dollars more for some of the most popular titles. We allege that executives at the highest levels of these companies–concerned that e-book sellers had reduced prices–worked together to eliminate competition among stores selling e-books, ultimately increasing prices for consumers.
The DOJ has also approved a settlement with Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, “and would require the companies to grant retailers–such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble–the freedom to reduce the prices of their e-book titles.”
The New York Times has an interesting article on the what was going on behind the scenes in the seedy underworld of publishing. Yeah, I don’t know if it’s seedy, but it sounds better.
Publishers, looking for leverage against Amazon, saw Apple as their white knight. The Justice Department complaint, using language that could have been inspired by a best-selling white-collar crime novel, describes how executives from the publishing companies met to discuss business matters “in private rooms for dinner in upscale Manhattan restaurants,” tried to hide their communications by issuing instructions to “double-delete” e-mails, all the time complaining of Amazon’s increasing influence over the e-book market.
Amazon immediately lowered prices on many of its popular titles.
Tags: Publishing
The DOJ should have gone after Amazon for predatory dumping.
(continued) Amazon has never really cared about selling books for a profit, they care about signing up new customers. That’s fine until you apply that model to digital books because when Amazon doesn’t make a profit it means that nobody can make a profit.
Unlike musicians who can stand to have their songs break even, authors can’t make it up on ticket sales.
I confess I don’t quite get the e-book business. It is pretty confusing when some e-books (in popular categories, not specialized) cost more than the physical book.
How exactly did this conspiracy work? These conspirators bought up the rights to certain books in such a way that other publishers like Amazon couldn’t offer them for publication as E books also? Is that it?
Amazon wanted a “wholesaler” relationship with the publishers for ebooks. That meant they could buy ebooks at a price set by the publisher, but then they owned the ebook. They could sell it for whatever they wanted to sell it for. The publishers wanted an “agency” relationship. The publisher still owned the book and could set the final sales price. That way Amazon could not undercut their own ebook sales efforts.
Apple offered them that agency relationship, and the Doj is saying that amounts to a price fixing conspiracy. Amazon reluctantly agreed to agency, that’s why ebooks are occasionally more than the print edition. Print books are still all sold under the wholesaler system.
I’ll buy an ebook the day I have finished reading all the free ebooks I want to. Even then, I’ll probably buy books on abebooks.com for $1 before I buy an ebook.
On second thought, I’ll probably never buy an ebook.
For textbooks, ebooks make sense, as long as you can always log in and read it online from anywhere as well as from your own e-reader. But if not, then I’d rather have a paper textbook.
Where technological change is concerned, what you think you will do is irrelevant to what you will do.
I’m pretty stubborn.
Stand by my Yoda-esque observation, I do.
I didn’t think I would like reading E books until I tried one. Now I like them.