Amazon Will Change Its Ebook Contracts With Publishers as EU Ends Antitrust Probe (theverge.com)

The EU has reached an agreement with Amazon following an antitrust investigation into the company's ebook business. From a report: In 2015, the European Commission began a probe into the licensing deals Amazon was making with publishers, suggesting that the US giant was forcing them into unfair contracts that stifled competition in Europe's 1 billion Euro ($1.09 billion) ebook market. In January, Amazon suggested a number of changes it would make to its contracts, and the EU now says it's happy to accept them, bringing a close to the investigation. The parts of the contract the EU objected to were a number of "most-favored-nation" clauses. These required any publishers doing a deal with Amazon to reveal the terms of the contracts they made with rival distributers. Amazon could then demand that it got the same deal (or better) on things like ebook prices, agency commissions, promotion campaigns, and release dates.

Comments

Re:Stifled competition..

[Geoffrey.landis]

Soo.. they say Amazon stifled competition.. but the parts of their contracts that they objected to were the "show us your other deals and give us the same deal" clauses that keeps prices consistent across retailers and prevents publishers from making sweetheart deals like they did with Apple. I don't see how that stifle's competition, per se.

Because this is price fixing.

I had a friend who is an independently published author. There are some e-book publishers that, on occasion, run sales: they will offer her book for, say 99 cents for a week as a promotion.

Amazon has a robot that trolls the web watching the price of e-books from competitors. If the robot finds a book offered for less than the Amazon price anywhere, at any time, Amazon will pull the book off of Amazon because their contract says nobody else is allowed to sell it for less.