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Apple Loses Ebook Price Fixing Appeal, Must Pay $450 Million
An anonymous reader writes: A federal appeals court ruled 2-1 today that Apple indeed conspired with publishers to increase ebook prices. The ruling puts Apple on the hook for the $450 million settlement reached in 2014 with lawyers and attorneys general from 33 states. The Justice Dept. contended that the price-fixing conspiracy raised the price of some e-books from the $10 standard set by Amazon to $13-$15. The one dissenting judge argued that Apple's efforts weren't anti-competitive because Amazon held 90% of the market at the time. Apple is unhappy with the ruling, but they haven't announced plans to take the case further. They said, "While we want to put this behind us, the case is about principles and values. We know we did nothing wrong back in 2010 and are assessing next steps."
NicBenjamin posting anonymously to avoid undoing mod-points. According to Statista, US eBook revenue in 2010 was only $1.52 Bil or so the year this started. If you asdd in the other years Apple's was doing this you get a total of $7.2 Billion. Since Amazon always had much greater marketshare then Apple, unless their profit margin was above 10% $450 Million represents all the profit they made on eBooks during those years and then some extra.
I know for the (originally print-only) technical books I published through "traditional" means, I get less than half of the royalty per copy that I get for a print book, even though the electronic copy is priced the same as the print copy. The way this was explained to me (~15 years ago) was that the publisher would not be able to charge as much for the electronic copy (!), but that is BS because the royalty is a % of the gross book cost and not a % of the sale price, and there is no manufacturing cost to speak of for electronic books (just the initial cost of editing/promoting the book.)
Publishers also hold back thousands of dollars in royalties to cover returns, even for electronic books and even long after the book has gone out of print...
Needless to say, I don't use traditional publishers anymore - even with lower numbers of sales, I've made more on my two self-published books than on the three books I did before that. Not enough to live on (I don't write books for a living) but enough to justify the time spent...
I print, therefore I am.