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Amazon E-Book Buyers Receive Payment From Antitrust Lawsuit Settlement (idropnews.com)
If you bought a Kindle e-book between April 2010 and May 2012, you might see some Amazon credit coming your way. The company is reportedly distributing funds from an antitrust lawsuit that it levied at Apple in 2013. From a report: Amazon has set up a website listing the available credits, and it has begun sending out emails this morning to U.S. customers who are eligible for a refund. Apple and a handful of book publishers, including Penguin, HarperCollins, Machete Book Group and Macmillan, were found guilty of conspiring to inflate the prices of e-books in order to weaken Amazon's grip on the market. While the book publishers settled out of court, Apple decided to fight the lawsuit and appealed several times. Eventually, it was ordered to pay a total of $450 million in the protracted antitrust case.
Several refunds have already been distributed because of the lawsuit. In fact, the bulk of credits were sent out in 2014 and 2016. The round of credits being sent out today comes from an earmarked $20 million meant to pay states involved in the suit. The Amazon credits have a six-month shelf life and must be spent by April 20, 2018, or they'll expire. In addition the Amazon credits, customers may also be receiving Apple credits that can be used toward iBooks, iTunes and App Store purchases. Apple is currently notifying eligible customers via email.
Several refunds have already been distributed because of the lawsuit. In fact, the bulk of credits were sent out in 2014 and 2016. The round of credits being sent out today comes from an earmarked $20 million meant to pay states involved in the suit. The Amazon credits have a six-month shelf life and must be spent by April 20, 2018, or they'll expire. In addition the Amazon credits, customers may also be receiving Apple credits that can be used toward iBooks, iTunes and App Store purchases. Apple is currently notifying eligible customers via email.
I received a $2.68 credit just today.
Pretty much pushed me over the top, counting what's in the cookie jar, and I'm purchasing an island next to Branson.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I received 78 cents.
I got Â38. Really. Thirty-eight cents. What a sweeping victory.
I got twenty bucks. I spent it on birdseed.
Because of this settlement there has been a dramatic drop in ebook prices. Now they are actually several pennies less than than the hardcopy version!
Thought this was already paid last year
Just saying, if you want it, you should be allowed to.
How is this fair to the people Amazon screwed? As always, it's only the lawyers that make money.
Me closed dat awful Amazon account. Oh wells It be from dat durn devil spawn Bezos. He be dat fella who done groped does gurls.
I got $30 last time and $7 today from Amazon, as I bought 800+ books over a 20 year period.
It's Hachette Book Group, but given the quality of their shipping department, I'll take Machete. Their customer service and credit department are equally bad--former bookstore worker.
Hilarious that Amazon is the good guy in the publishing industry apparently. Apple and the book publishers wanted to see publishers paid MORE and they lost this. What a fucking system.
I just ordered "Algorithms for Dummies" that just came out this year. Now I can get smart!
Yeah, Amazon was the good guy, because they were the ones keeping eBook prices reasonable. After the publishers basically won the lawsuit (the settlement resulted in publishers picking their own prices), they regularly price their eBooks similarly to or sometimes even higher than hardcover physical editions.
So often a used copy of a book, even with shipping, is still less than the ebook price, and you actually own the darn thing with no DRM or other nonsense. You can make your own ebook with a scanner and 45 minutes of your time if you really have to have that.
Never buy ebooks with DRM. NEVER!
You are only licensing the content until they don't think you deserve it anymore.
It isn't like a paper book, which can be left to your heirs, sold without hassle once you are done with the book.
Go DRM free. Of course, treat the content "like a book" and respect the author/publisher's license.
Sorry if I have missed the sarcasm but...
Amazon won the lawsuit (wrongly, in my opinion, but I have absolutely no faith in the US legal system when it comes to such matters) and the publishers and Apple lost, so Amazon are free to continuing screwing customers and publishers to distort the market in their favour.
It does mean that Amazon now sell selected eBooks more cheaply than would otherwise be the case, but only when that fulfils their longer term aim of reducing competition so allowing them to charge more in the future. And now it's too late to tell it to the judge (again).
I got 38 cents.
I got a whole $1.52!
It's amazing the shit these laywers manage to pull off. Instead of an actual cash refund for how much they illegally ripped you off by, you get "credit" to spend at their store.
Since they have their profit margin on whatever you buy with this, they are still making money from you and being rewarded for their bad behaviour. Plus I see people posting about the tiny amounts they are getting, so if you actually want to buy anything, you will need to spend even more of your money to take advantage of it.
Add to that there is a nice time limit on there which will save them even more money, from all the people who don't claim it within the time limit, this is a joke. You might as well just let them off entirely, this as a "punishment" is a huge green light saying "please do something similar again in future, you'll make more money overall".
Yeah, Amazon was the good guy, because they were the ones keeping eBook prices reasonable.
Only for their customers, because Amazon just took the losses of selling the e-books below what they paid the publishers, that other e-book sellers couldn't. But hey, you don't get a 90+% market share by not cheating.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
The email they sent cost more than that.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
I buy eBooks from Barnes and Noble, and have been informed that I get a small credit from them because of the suit.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
with that same worthless credit.
Woohoo! I going to combine it with all that money I keep "saving" at the grocery store and pretty soon I'll have enough for a membership at Mar-a-Lago!