Apple Fires Back At DoJ Over eBook Price Fixing

An anonymous reader writes "CNN takes a look at Apple's response to the Department of Justice's investigation into eBook price fixing. The filing 'cuts the government's case to shreds' while at the same time not bothering to defend the five publishers also under investigation. Apple said, 'The Government starts from the false premise (PDF) that an eBooks "market" was characterized by "robust price competition" prior to Apple's entry. This ignores a simple and incontrovertible fact: before 2010, there was no real competition, there was only Amazon. At the time Apple entered the market, Amazon sold nearly nine out of every ten eBooks, and its power over price and product selection was nearly absolute.'"

Comments

What was the original submitter smoking

[bl968]

I can see by this submission the Apple's law firm reads Slashdot. The submissions text is so far out in left field It's not even funny! Reading the actual court filings you don't come up with the fact that Apple tore anything to shreds, much less the government's case. Apple does try to defend itself and its actions but that is to try to defend the indefensible. The government has damning words by Apple's own Steve Jobs and in spite attempts by Apple to minimize the effect of those words. The real world results prove the governments case. In my opinion.

Apple deliberately misleads the court in its filings claiming that Amazon Kindle owners can only buy books from Amazon. This is the same as suggesting that iPad owners can only buy books from Apple. Apple ignores and myriad of smaller e-book competitors, I guess they just beneath Apple's notice. I have purchased e-books from many sources as sometimes the book I'm looking for is not simply not available from Amazon, so I have to use the excellent Calibre program to convert and manage my non-Amazon e-book purchases, as well as to load the books onto my device. It serves this function quite well.

Even when Amazon was the primary large e-book vendor on the Internet, there was nothing preventing publishers from maintaining their own storefronts for people to buy their e-books directly from them at close to the wholesale price that they charge Amazon, indeed, this would've made a lot of sense.

I've written on Slashdot in the past that the price of electronic goods are much less than those of physical goods. With electronic goods. You don't have the rights of printing, binding, shipping, and handling returns. While yes, the publishers who have cost in editing a manuscript, creating artwork, these costs, they would've paid anyway for the print version of the book. Once a single e-book is created by the publisher. You can distribute it an unlimited number of times. So the publishers make nearly a 100% profit on electronic sales. Consumers instinctively know this, and expect to pay much less. this desire for higher prices rivaling those of print or electronic version has significantly impeded the vibrant and competitive e-book marketplace consumers should have been able to expect.

The real crime that the publishers feel that Amazon has committed and needed punishment for was by providing a mechanism for small independent authors to get their works to market. I have read many of these $1-$2 e-books, and despite a few disappointments have been relatively happy with the experience.

What Apple has done with their anti-competitive in spite of their claims to the contrary, most-favored-nation status is to ensure that publishers must control the prices that they charge other vendors for the books, in order to account for Apple's most-favored-nation status and agency fee. This has the intended effect of raising the costs for e-books for consumers by preventing publishers from being able to choose to discount the retail price on new release books and in doing so causing harm to consumers. Which is the heart of the government's case. Walmart was found guilty a price-fixing, along with music publishers; and Apple will be too. I can't wait!

u r n ignoramus

[luis_a_espinal]

Yes, because you know that those books available on Project Gutenberg were never sold, no one tried to buy one and it was only when they were available online for free that people tried to read them.

Non sequitur. Why? Because:

1. What you said doesn't prove that paying for books is bad, and most importantly

2. What you said is not fucking true.

I can prove to you that what you said is not true by contradiction. If what you said was true (that no one tried to read the books in Project Gutenberg), then it has to the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", Cervantes's Qixote, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" to name a few.

This is obviously not true since these writings have been the object of substantial reading through the centuries and ages, which predates free e-books. Ergo, your statement is false (in addition to being tangential), and you are an idiot for making it.