Slashdot Mirror
Judge Approves Settlement In eBook Price-Fixing Case
An anonymous reader writes "On Thursday a U.S. District Judge approved a settlement between the Department of Justice and three publishers accused to colluding to inflate ebook prices (order). 'The Justice Department had accused Apple and five publishers in April of illegally colluding on prices as part of an effort to fight internet retailer Amazon.com Inc's dominance of e-books. The publishers who agreed to settle are News Corp's HarperCollins Publishers Inc, CBS Corp's Simon & Schuster Inc and Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group. Apple; Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and Pearson Plc's Penguin Group have vowed to fight the Justice Department's lawsuit with a trial due to start on June 3 next year.' The decision came after a lengthy period of public comment. According to the AP, 'The ruling released Thursday cast aside the strident objections of Apple, other book publishers, book sellers and authors who argued the settlement will empower Internet retailing giant Amazon.com Inc. to destroy the "literary ecosystem" with rampant discounting that most competitors can't afford to match. Those worries were repeatedly raised in court filings about the settlement. More than 90 percent of the 868 public comments about the settlement opposed the agreement.'"
how do you sell an ebook copy at "below cost"? that implies that amazon paid authors out of their own pocket? is this right?
(because, in the sw world.. amazon actually makes the author accept zero payment for the privilidge of amazon giving the sw away as promotion)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I have mod points. Now, if only there was a '+1 Flamebait', because, as right as you are, you are going to get a thrashing.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
I, for one, hope this results in lower eBook prices.
I have a Kindle (and Nook tablet) that are underutilized because I refuse to pay more for an eBook than I do to have a paper book delivered to my house. About the only eBooks I read are from Smashwords or Baen. Almost every book I've bought from Amazon has been a used paper book because they are typically about half the price of an eBook.
After 2 years with the Kindle, I've bought exactly 3 Amazon eBooks - all purchased before traveling since I didn't want to carry around heavy paper books. I've never gotten around to reselling my used books (which would net me another dollar or two of savings), so my local thrift shop has been getting them.
Yeah, lots of the comments were opposed. The judge looked through them, and saw that all the reasons people/groups/corporations were opposed weren't illegal or anticompetitive. So, no reason to reject the settlement.
I am getting pretty annoyed how so many companies are being settled with for legal issues, at cost of a mere pittance to these companies.
I want to see the ban hammer come down and come down hard on these guys. If i break the law with something as simple as a parking ticket, that is a substantial cost to me. if I were to break the law in something major it screws me for life. Why is this not being applied to corporations?
Price fixing? confiscate ALL past profits gained from of the fixing, and fine future profits as an exponential multiplier of the fixing revenue. not to mention jail time for the crooks who okay the fixing. make companies leave yellow piddle marks when people even suggest they could be price fixing, colluding, bribery.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
They need to make it easier to download their ebooks, in more formats, without DRM (which Amazon has)so third party applications can organize the downloads better. In other words, provide more value than Amazon currently offers.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Do you realize that the agency model was designed to allow for publishers to set the prices thereby removing the power from the distributor/seller and to disrupt Amazon's monopoly?
Amazon could, at first, offer lower prices to the consumer until they wiped out the competition but once they were supreme, they could jack up the prices or try to gouge the publishers/authors for lower wholesale prices with threats to not carry their books in the future.
You seriously should not be happy with a monopoly of the justice department enforcing a return to a monopoly. The market should be allowed to decide. If a book does not sell well, the market forces should cause the publisher to lower the sale price until it does sell.
Amazon, in the digital space, and Wal-mart in the brick and mortar space, were actively using predatory pricing to squeeze out all of the other competition. That situation is not good for the consumer in the long run.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Do you realize that the agency model was designed to allow for publishers to set the prices thereby removing the power from the distributor/seller and to disrupt Amazon's monopoly?
So instead of Amazon having a monopoly the publishers get one. Your logic fails. Having a monopoly isn't illegal either. Abusing that monopoly is. Amazon never attempted to stop others from selling anything.
I work for a publishing company and ... this is going to blow your mind ... a significant majority of our authors wouldn't want to have to be responsible for editing, promoting, designing, and selling their product. They also tend to really like that we give them money in advance before they even have a finished manuscript. Their book could sell zero copies but they at least got several grand out of the deal; it's a comforting thought when putting in months of effort.
Are there examples of authors out there who do like to take the hands on approach and can it work out for them? Sure. I seriously doubt however that our 60+ year old Amish fiction author wants to try and figure out why InDesign hyphenates across a page break despite being told not to when you add a hyperlink text destination for the table of content.
This will certainly wreck Apple's 30% profit margin ecosystem. The whole publishing ecosystem I'm less certain about.
Monopoly ... mono ... kind of indicates the singular so I don't see how multiple publishers can have a singular monopoly. Certainly, the big 5 can be dickish but there are hundreds if not thousands of smaller publishers out there; I work for one. I would consider dumping product as an abuse of a monopoly and Amazon had done just that with our books in the past and there's no reason they won't do so in the future to further cement their monopoly in online physical book sales and e-books via the Kindle.
So instead of Amazon having a monopoly the publishers [i.e., more than one] get one. Your logic fails.
Speaking of logic fails...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I believe the term your looking for is oligopoly. You have the choice of a monopoly of the retailer or a oligopoly of the big 5 publishers. I would argue the oligopoly is preferable to the monopoly due to barrier of entry. There are hundreds if not thousands of smaller publishers that might not rival the oligopoly in terms of size but we can remain profitable and every once and a while hit it big with a best seller. Amazon is already entrenched as a practical monopoly and I just don't see how any sort of small upstart is going to overcome that. Small publishers can and do exist in the existing oligopoly but small retail outlets will not with Amazon's ability to dump product.
I have owned a kindle for about a year and a half. I own over 110 ebooks (most are tech, but also some fiction, classics, etc).
I have *never* seen a printed book cost less than the kindle ebook of the same title. I essentially always buy the ebook over the dead tree version, and aside from instant access, the reason that I do so is because the kindle version is frequently 30% (or more) less cost than the physical version (before thinking about shipping costs). Where are all of these books that are more expensive for kindle than for the paper versions? (Hint: they don't seem to be O'reily, Cisco Press, Apress, SAMS, Sybex, or Microsoft Press.)
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
An e-book monopoly? What on earth are you talking about? I'm sure Apple, the most valuable company in history, has more than enough cash to match whatever price Amazon feels like charging. And don't forget B&N, whose Nook is selling pretty well, if not as well as the Kindle.
In addition, a Kindle will easily read books from other online stores; about 2/3rds of the books on my Kindle didn't come from Amazon, and few of those books are available in electronic format through Amazon.
In addition, it's silly to talk about theoretical future harms from a currently non-existent Amazon monopoly, when we have Agency Pricing, which results in artificially inflated consumer pricing right now.
And how is Wal-Mart's pricing power bad for consumers? There has been little evidence to date that Wal-Mart raises their prices after the local competition shutters. Their consistently low prices (and forcing low prices at their competitors) has been really good for consumers, if not so hot for jobs.
So, you'll be replaced with lighter, more flexible, more competitive entities that do "editing, promoting, designing, and selling" and focus on competitive digital distribution.
The OP suggests that publishing model is obsolete and good riddance with publishers. So what he is suggesting is to get rid of publishers who take manuscripts, process them, and deliver them to market. You then suggest they be replaced with entities that do the same thing. The entities you describe already exist and they have a name: publishers. Will they have to adapt to the market? Yes,and those that hope to survive must. Would the market be better off if there were no publishers willing to risk author advances, process manuscripts, and deliver them to the market? I believe so, yes.
Yes, Amazon paid some authors out of thier own pocket. It also pays publishers directly as well. They purchased a book for $20 wholesale and sell it for $9.99 as a promotion. This is selling below cost. No evidence they were losing money on all their ebook sales. Amazons strategy is low low low margins. They lose money on best sellers and make up the loss with other books. They can do this because of the huge volume of sales that is possible when you have low low low margins. Their strategy is the exact opposite of Apples.