Connecticut AG To Grill Amazon, Apple Over E-Book Price Fixing

suraj.sun tips news that Connecticut's Attorney General has demanded a meeting with Apple and Amazon to discuss anti-competitive pricing methods in the e-book market. From Ars: "Richard Blumenthal says that he wants representatives from both on-line giants in his office ASAP to discuss what Blumenthal calls their 'most favored nation' arrangements with big book companies like Macmillan and Simon & Schuster. The crux of the MFN concept is that a given product maker must offer a given distributor the lowest price it's offering anyone. If a competing distributor gets a price break, they get it too. 'The net effect is fairly obvious,' Blumenthal warned in his letter to Amazon (PDF), 'in that MFNs will reduce the publisher's incentive to offer a discount to Amazon if it would have to offer the same discount to Apple, leading to the establishment of a price floor for e-books offered by the publisher.'"

Comments

AUGH

[Pojut]

Fucking e-books. Why does it cost more to buy an e-book than it does to buy a dead-tree paperback? wtf?

I absolutely adore my nook, but it's filled with public works and books that have been gifted to me...I refuse to pay $10 for a digital copy of a book.