“You may remember that Amazon helped persuade the U.S. Department of Justice to sue Apple in April 2012, claiming that Apple conspired with five of the nation’s largest publishers to fix the price of e-books at a level different than what Amazon had set,” Kathleen Sharp reports for Salon. “Amazon, the web’s biggest retailer, had been selling published books at a money-losing rate of $9.99. Why? To get us to buy its Kindle e-book reader, and to dominate the e-book market. Amazon’s strategy worked. According to court documents, the firm soon controlled 90 percent of the e-book market.”
“This meant that publishers — who had invested in the writing, production, promotion and distribution of these books — couldn’t sell their wares at the recommended retail price of $14.99. Nor could brick-and-mortar stores match Amazon’s money-losing discounts,” Sharp reports. “Amazon’s product-dumping and predatory pricing helped bankrupt many small-town bookstores. Yet, neither publishers nor independent booksellers sued Amazon, even though they might have had a good case (as we’ll soon see).”
“Every year, the ‘Library & Book Trade Almanac,’ an authority in the field, reports annual sales by book category. It 2008, when Amazon had a lock on the market, it reported that the average price of an adult fiction e-book in the U.S. in was $8.71. In 2009, as more people self-published books, the average dropped to $8.21. In 2010, when Apple introduced its agency model for e-books, the price dropped 14 percent to $7.06. And when publishers were up and running against Amazon in 2011, the average price of an e-book sank by an astonishing 32 percent — to $4.83. “That’s a steal,” said Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University,” Sharp reports. “The almanac has yet to publish final figures for 2012. But Digital Book World Daily, another expert, reports that e-book prices for fiction in 2012 ranged from $4 to $7. ‘My feeling is that the DOJ didn’t see these numbers,’ said Greco. Which gets to the heart of this bizarre case: The numbers show that, far from hurting the market, the publishers’ and Apple’s agency model actually helped it.”
Much more in the full article – very highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: The current U.S. DOJ is plainly inept and the judge in this case is obviously nothing more than a stupid puppet.
Lady Elaine Fairchilde (left), Judge Denise Cote (right), or vice versa
