Apple Holds Firm As Publishers Settle With DoJ Over e-Book Pricing

Nerval's Lobster writes "The U.S. Department of Justice has just settled with book publisher Macmillan in an ongoing case over the price of e-books, bringing its number of settlements with big-name publishers up to five. Justice claims that those five publishers, along with Apple, agreed to 'raise retail e-book prices and eliminate price competition, substantially increasing prices paid by consumers.' Apple competes fiercely in the digital-media space against Amazon, which often discounts the prices of Kindle e-books as a competitive gambit; although all five publishers earn significant revenues from sales of Kindle e-books, Amazon's massive popularity among book-buyers — coupled with the slow decline of bricks-and-mortar bookstores — gives it significant leverage when it comes to lowering those e-book prices as it sees fit. But Justice and Apple seem determined to keep their court date later this year."

Re:And those expensive E-books...

[GIL_Dude]

Not only are they expensive, they are also not sold. They are licensed. This removes the ability to use the provisions of the first sale doctrine. So you can buy a license to a book - but you can't transfer it. With a physical book I can sell it to a used book store, hand it to my wife or kids and let them read it, send it off to a friend in another state, donate it, etc. With an e-book I can't (legally) do any of that. I can't even let my wife read it on her e-reader (separate account). Since we are very limited in what we can do (again legally) with them, they don't have the same value to me as a consumer. Yet they charge the same (or higher) price. I had put my thoughts on this into a blog entry some months back. They still pertain now. http://gildude.blogspot.com/2012/03/have-you-bought-into-e-book-model.html [blogspot.com]

One of the things I'd like to see if the ability to transfer from one cloud service to another. Amazon has theirs, Google has theirs, other folks likewise have theirs. But I have no (legal) way to transfer an e-book out of say Amazon's service and into say Google's service if, for instance, I decide I want to use a different e-reader and move "my" licensed content. Can't do it. The only value I get out of e-books that is missing from physical books is the amount of books that can be stored on a small device and the ability to add more to that device from say a hotel room on a trip. However e-books have all the previously mentioned downsides - many of which people are very slowly becoming aware of.

Re:And those expensive E-books...

[kbrannen]

One can easily argue that the price of the e-books shouldn't be dirt cheap because the content is what you're really paying for. What should be true is e-books are the price of the physical book minus all the expenses that physical books have the e-books don't (e.g. paper, printing, shipping, etc) plus a few cents for the server. I don't know what percent that is of a physical book, but that does seem reasonable. I'm disgusted when I see the e-book costing the same or more than a physical book.

Re:Of course Apple are going to take it to court.

[Anonymous Coward]

But Amazon is selling books at prices across the board that are unprofitable and accusing anyone charging higher prices of gouging. They are actively trying to destroy other distributors and bring publishers under their thumb. This is going to hurt consumers in the long run because destroying publishers and distributors ability to make a profit will result in fewer books getting published. Consumers will have fewer books to choose from and fewer venues in which to shop for them.

I'm absolutely amazed that folks here on Slashdot who claim to value freedom, etc, are actually cheering Amazon's attempt to build a monopoly. Has everyone's hatred for Apple really blinded them that much to what's going on here?

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Re:It was worse than that

[gnasher719]

Agency pricing is pretty scummy period in my opinion, and is fairly rare. Here not only was it being done, but as a collusion.

Apple has so far sold 25 billion songs, all with agency pricing. Record companies set the price, and Apple sells it. The same things with books. Apple sells tens of thousands of different ebooks. They don't want to worry about what price to set for each book. So they let the publisher set the price; the publisher has more experience anyway.

Now apparently Apple told the publisher: If you sell the same book to other distributors for less, then we are not interested. Can't see anything wrong with that.