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."

Re:Yay for monopoly!

[king neckbeard]

There's nothing illegal about being by far the largest e-book publisher. There is something illegal about conspiring with the majority of an industry to collude in price fixing. Also, I'm amazed at the gall of being upset that an illegal conspiracy against customers is actually leading to said customers being compensated.

Re:Yay for monopoly!

[Karlt1]

Unlike you, I am glad that Amazon is able to set their prices LOWER once again without a MFN clause getting in the way.

So why do you think Amazon is willing to sell ebooks at a loss?

Do you think they just love their customers or maybe if they can drive their competitors out of business they can raise prices later?

Re:Yay for monopoly!

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? That is what apple said? The publishers were unhappy with Amazon discounting the books for a while but were unable to do anything individually. Apple came around and said we can work on this with you. The 5 publishers all got on-board and then gave amazon an ultimatum. change your model to agency or be excluded from the market.

Apple also said this:
'We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway.'"

See the part where Jobs acknowledged the customer (thats you and me) pays more?
Is that how competition should work?

Competition is good...Cartels not so much

[tuppe666]

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.

Re:evil of AAPL vs evil of AMZN

[king neckbeard]

Worse, because Amazon was acting like an efficiency monopoly, not a coercive monopoly. It's like complaining about Google's dominance in search when it was due entirely to being better.