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Court Bars Apple From Making Industry-Wide E-book Deals

Posted by Soulskill on from the play-nice-with-others-or-else dept.

itwbennett writes "The federal judge presiding over the U.S. electronic books case against Apple has barred the company from striking deals that would ensure that it could undercut prices of other retailers in the e-book market and also prohibited Apple from letting any one publisher know what deals the company is striking up with other publishers. For its part, Apple said it plans to appeal the ruling (PDF), denying that it conspired to fix ebook pricing. Meanwhile, Amazon is alerting customers of their potential payout, which could be as much as $3.82 for every eligible Kindle book."

2 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Cheaper Prices by tuppe666 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Personally, I think the lawsuit was rather ridiculous, since Amazon was poised to destroy the entire industry,

    Ignoring your waffle. By Industry you mean "bleeding customers" by Middle Men who are desperate to remain relevant post paper. Raising ebooks prices has been *damaging* to the ebook industry. Hopefully these parasites will become obsolete one day, how they treat authors is appalling. hopefully we will see a rise in self publishing.

    1. Re:Cheaper Prices by Anubis+IV · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm actually with you on hoping for a rise in self-publishing, though not as it is now, nor am I rooting for the demise of the publishers, since I think they serve a valuable function in the market.

      Publishers, despite their name, actually do quite a bit more than publishing. Really, their worth today is in their editing and marketing, and both of those are EXTREMELY important in the self-publishing market, where most of the stuff that's there simply isn't worth our time, making it hard for anything that's good to stand out. I'd love to see the publishers shift their role from publishing to marketing, where for a cut of the profits they agree to handle the editing and advertising of the book. The result would be that they'd only be doing it for books that they thought were good enough to turn a profit, which means that the stuff we'd be hearing about would be the stuff that's more likely to be worth reading.

      More or less, they should get out of the dying middleman business and focus on the added-value business that they are uniquely capable of offering.

      As for Amazon, my complaint was more that Amazon was on the verge of engaging in anticompetitive practices by leveraging their monopsony in the wholesale market to destroy the publishers, which would, in turn, boost their own self-published eBooks business. There's nothing wrong with self-publishing destroying the publishers, in and of itself, but I do have a problem when a company leverages their control over the market to do so, which is what Amazon was set to do.