“The government has reached a proposed settlement with Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC, which does business as Macmillan, one of five major book publishers that allegedly conspired with Apple Inc. to raise e-book prices for consumers, the Justice Department announced Friday,” Hillel Italie and Larry Neumeister report for The Associated Press. “The government is continuing its case against Apple but has now reached agreements with the five publishers.”
“The Justice Department complaint alleged that the five companies and Apple worked together to raise retail e-book prices and eliminate price competition,” Italie and Neumeister report. “The government said competition had reduced e-book prices and the retail profit margins of the booksellers.”
Italie and Neumeister report, “Under the proposed settlement, which still needs approval by a federal judge in New York, Macmillan will lift restrictions on discounting and other promotions by e-book retailers. It will be barred from entering new agreements with similar restrictions until December 2014. ‘We settled because the potential penalties became too high to risk even the possibility of an unfavorable outcome,’ Macmillan CEO John Sargent said Friday in an online letter to authors, illustrators and agents. Sargent said the company did not reach an agreement earlier because, in part, ‘I had an old-fashioned belief that you should not settle if you have done no wrong. As it turns out, that is indeed old-fashioned.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, John, was the castration painful?
The U.S. DOJ is plainly inept.
Killing real competition for the appearance of competition is just plain stupid.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Rainy Day” for the heads up.]
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