Slashdot Mirror
Court Bars Apple From Making Industry-Wide E-book Deals
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."
Apple will just make a different deal per publisher. Unless, of course, the publishers create their own e-pub organization that then strikes a deal with Apple.
I'm glad I like the Kindle system (and I really do like it, having a lot of Kindle books), what with the government curb-stomping any possible competition for what was already by far the largest e-book publisher at the time of the events the Apple trial was about...
A nice touch Amazon forcing the publishers to cough up dough for daring to try and limit the ability of Amazon to set prices to whatever they like regardless of publisher wishes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Barnes and Noble is also notifying their nook owners about the payout.
Off your knees for a second!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-unless-hes-serious-vote-no/2013/09/05/18fb85be-165c-11e3-804b-d3a1a3a18f2c_story.html
"Sen. Bob Corker: “What is it you’re seeking?”
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “I can’t answer that, what we’re seeking.”
DO YOU HEAR THAT DOUCHEBAGS? DO YOU!!!
Because, yea, I remember all you fucktards treating Bush the Evil One with the same amount of vitriol when he, for example actually went to congress and GOT FUCKING AUTHORIZATION TO ACT.
No, no double standards here, you fuckwads.
Apple always seem to do so well in court. The timeframe has dropped to 10 years to five. The remedies to include "music, movies, television shows or other content," all gone. Apple having to allow Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others to sell content through links to their own stores in their iOS apps, thereby avoiding Apple's 30 per cent tariff.
Apple is not going to be concerned about a few $. It is becoming increasingly necessary for content to move cross platform easily, without being treated as a criminal for removing trivial DRM, for all content and I include Applications. There is no technical reason for this today.
Hello Slashdot Old Timers!
Don't you love it now when Apple haters get modded UP?
Because back in the day, ANY criticism of APPLE - regardless of its merit - was automatically modded down as "Flamebait" , "Troll", "Overrated", or something else.
And you people (Slashdot population in general) think you're better than the rest of humanity.
You're just as pathetic as them all. And you're too stupid to see it.
Actually apple came in and offered a way to break the amazon monopoly.
Apple Didn't offer DRM free ebooks at lower prices than Amazon...you know compete. Apple formed a price fixing cartel with publishers which is bad for consumers, and removing the ability to compete with Apple(Even if you are not buying Apple products)...the reason why Monopolises are bad.
Steve Jobs should have gone to jail.
Don't you love it now when Apple haters get modded UP?
I am not sure they do, but the image of technical mind hippy revolutionary is long gone and replaced by a mega corporation prepared to lie, pay no tax towards hospitals and schools, steal money from consumers, proud of manufacture goods in china (including new reports this week...again) by badly treated by China's own standards workers, produce damaging to the environment products, and is incredibly litigious, on the backs of heavily marked up mid range products. if popular opinion is going against them maybe they should, I don't know..."Think Differently"
The payout is a separate thing that's a result of the settlements the DoJ struck with the publishers last year. It's part of the same issue, but it was settled out of court and wasn't part of this case.
For this ruling, the judge is barring Apple from engaging in "most favored nation" clauses (i.e. "our store will always have the lowest price for your product, or will be tied for having the lowest price") and is forcing them to stagger re-negotiations with the various publishers over the next few years in order to ensure that no collusion occurs. As I understand it, and I may be mistaken, they are not barred from engaging in agency model deals (i.e. "you get to set the price and we'll take X% cut"), which was actually a large part of what led to the price increase in the first place. Prior to that, the industry standard was the wholesale model (i.e. "we negotiate a price that you sell the book to us for, but then we can sell it to consumers for whatever")
Personally, I think the lawsuit was rather ridiculous, since Amazon was poised to destroy the entire industry, and the shift to the agency model was a necessary one to ensure the long-term health of the industry. Prior to Apple showing up with iBooks, Amazon was in a position to leverage its monopsony on the eBook market (like a monopoly, except it's when someone commands the buying side of the market, rather than the selling side) to force the publishers' hands and demand lower and lower wholesale prices. The publishers recognized the threat that posed them, so they worked out an agency deal instead, which led to lower short-term profits (despite the increased cost to consumers, simply because the agency model took a bigger cut than the wholesale model was at the time), but provided them with long-term control over their own prices.
Effectively, they took away Amazon's ability to do what was best for itself at the expense of the industry as a whole. After all, Amazon wins by lowering prices regardless of what happens to the publishers: by forcing them out it becomes the de facto publisher for virtually all eBooks thanks to its self-publishing tools, and by lowering their prices to unsustainable levels it pleases consumers and locks some of them into its ecosystem through the proprietary .azw and .kf8 eBook formats. Had the publishers been colluding to increase profits by gouging customers, I'd definitely be in support knocking them around for antitrust stuff, but the fact that they were making less money per unit sold under the agency model tells me that this was a long-term play to stay alive, rather than a short-term one to turn a quick buck at the expense of the consumer, and as such, the DoJ should have left it alone, even if it did increase the cost to consumers.
(Admitted lack of citation: I did read in multiple places over the last few months that profits were down under the agency model, but I'm knocking this comment out quickly, so I don't have time to look them up. Sorry. Doubters and welcome to doubt.)
There's nothing illegal about being by far the largest e-book publisher.
I didn't say there was. Just that they have a monopoly in the ebook market, which is clear and true and definitely not illegal.
What should also be legal, is for publishers to say "you cannot sell my book for less than $X". Amazon can sell books for any price they like, down to $0, and the publisher cannot complain. Does that sound right to you? It means if a publisher irks Amazon, they can send book profits spiraling down.
It may seem good for the consumer at first until you realize what happens after years when Amazon has killed all eBook competition.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
mobile apps are generally still created for their walled garden before more open platform even though it has a falling market share
Android has a larger market for Applications with Apple having only 900,000 Apps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_App_Store vs Androids Play store http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play 1+ million apps and the gap is going to get wider. The iphone is none existent in some markets, so no developers in those markets create iphone apps. The iphone also uses legacy hardware, and no gaming platform where android has many consoles, and cutting edge devices. The days of iOS exclusive or even first is long gone. Apple is in real trouble if they don't get the launch on the 10th right.
If only the people who were doing self published books would actually write books worth reading. Right now they're so bad I feel like I've been scammed every time I buy one.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
survival p8Ospects Bloc in order to
of *BSD asswipes smells worse than a be a lot slower things the right fact there won't you got the8e. Or Hapless *BSD backwards. To the FreeBSD core team
Actually apple came in and offered a way to break the amazon monopoly.
Apple Didn't offer DRM free ebooks at lower prices than Amazon...you know compete. Apple formed a price fixing cartel with publishers which is bad for consumers, and removing the ability to compete with Apple(Even if you are not buying Apple products)...the reason why Monopolises are bad.
Steve Jobs should have gone to jail.
Is this better or worse then the situation before, where Amazon was basically acting like a monopoly?
Seems like Apple is getting let off very easy after carefully organizing the screwing-over of consumers.
So they get to try this again in 5 years?
And shouldn't the solution be forward looking? Is Apple actually doing the same thing with movies or other content besides books now and getting away with it?
"There is when you're using your size in an anticompetitive manner, which Amazon was on the verge of doing."
So they weren't using it in an anti competitive manner, but you think they were on the verge of doing so?
1) You are not the arbiter of law. We have the justice system for that.
2) You have to commit a crime first to be a criminal (or at least be accused of one and committed for it). When even you say "they haven't yet", then there's no crime.