Amazon.com and 'Big Five' Publishers Accused of eBook Price-Fixing (theguardian.com) 50
Amazon.com and the "Big Five" publishers -- Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster -- have been accused of colluding to fix ebook prices, in a class action filed by the law firm that successfully sued Apple and the Big Five on the same charge 10 years ago. The Guardian reports: The lawsuit, filed in district court in New York on Thursday by Seattle firm Hagens Berman, on behalf of consumers in several US states, names the retail giant as the sole defendant but labels the publishers "co-conspirators." It alleges Amazon and the publishers use a clause known as "Most Favored Nations" (MFN) to keep ebook prices artificially high, by agreeing to price restraints that force consumers to pay more for ebooks purchased on retail platforms that are not Amazon.com. The lawsuit claims that almost 90% of all ebooks sold in the US are sold on Amazon, in addition to over 50% of all print books. The suit alleges that ebook prices dropped in 2013 and 2014 after Apple and major publishers were successfully sued for conspiring to set ebook prices, but rose again after Amazon renegotiated their contracts in 2015.
"In violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Defendant and the Big Five Co-conspirators agreed to various anti-competitive MFNs and anti-competitive provisions that functioned the same as MFNs," the complaint states. "Amazon's agreement with its Co-conspirators is an unreasonable restraint of trade that prevents competitive pricing and causes Plaintiffs and other consumers to overpay when they purchase ebooks from the Big Five through an ebook retailer that competes with Amazon. That harm persists and will not abate unless Amazon and the Big Five are stopped." The suit seeks compensation for consumers who purchased ebooks through competitors, damages and injunctive relief that would require Amazon and the publishers to "stop enforcing anti-competitive price restraints."
"In violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Defendant and the Big Five Co-conspirators agreed to various anti-competitive MFNs and anti-competitive provisions that functioned the same as MFNs," the complaint states. "Amazon's agreement with its Co-conspirators is an unreasonable restraint of trade that prevents competitive pricing and causes Plaintiffs and other consumers to overpay when they purchase ebooks from the Big Five through an ebook retailer that competes with Amazon. That harm persists and will not abate unless Amazon and the Big Five are stopped." The suit seeks compensation for consumers who purchased ebooks through competitors, damages and injunctive relief that would require Amazon and the publishers to "stop enforcing anti-competitive price restraints."
Adjusting the rules of the game? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone notice a dribble? Me neither.
As usual, I want to think in terms of solutions. So how could we adjust the rules of the game so that the wannabe monopolists will find it more profitable to keep the competition going, with freedom and greater choice for all?
My idea would be to adjust the principles underlying the tax system to increase retained earnings by decreasing monopoly positions. And to prevent collaboration in cases like this, there should be special tax breaks or even rewards for anyone who blo
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> My idea would be to adjust the principles underlying the tax system to increase retained earnings by decreasing monopoly positions
Care to elaborate?
> Additional detailed suggestion approaches available upon polite request, though that's pretty rare on Slashdot these years. Or even better if you have a better idea.
Can we hold you to the same standard of behavior that you are requesting? Sometimes you're interesting to talk to because you stay calm and rational when people have different viewpoints.
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I am quite willing to stipulate that I can flame with the best of them, but I was trained by a couple of the best flamers. And we had a few magnificent trolls in those days, too. However my principle is to avoid starting anything and only provide a carefully measured tit for tat. Oh yeah. I better stipulate that my patience is not so great, though I think I've actually become a bit more patient over the years.
On the topic you politely asked about, my main idea would involve a progressive profits tax, but wi
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Thanks for that.
> but there is a major problem with allowing for proper support of inventions that really do require gigantic resources that can only be provided by a major corporation or government lab... (Similar problems afflict copyright law.
Indeed. I've pointed out previously that there are millions of artists an tens of millions of songs on MySpace. I think there used to be a billion. Which nobody listens to. While they complain about the record company's price for the artist the company picked t
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A pair of thoughts did occur to me about monopolies, and actors with market power.
I wonder which could be done more effectively - discouraging / penalizing big companies and monopolies, or encouraging competition and supporting smaller companies. One might come up with very different solutions from the mindset of encouraging competition.
One thing that would help a *little* bit encouraging competition would be to keep the smaller companies in mind when writing the regulations, taxes, etc. As one example, fo
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Sorry, but my real life time is not meshing with Slashdot time right now. I'll try to get back to this discussion before it dies completely. I think your responses are substantive and deserve significant attention, but that is just from a quick scan.
However I think I should have included more of the underlying principle, which is the relationship of choice to freedom. That is also related to assessing market share, where each market can be defined by the realistic choices. It is slightly complicated because
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I hear ya. I'm back to learning to parse complicated algorithms in assembly code, then figure out how to exploit them. So that's supposedly what I'll be doing instead of Slashdot for the next 13 weeks.
143 binary exploits in 13 weeks. Then back to Slashdot.
See ya later.
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My time pressure is also worsening and Slashdot time is low on the totem pole of priorities, but regarding your new topic, don't forget the HCF opcode. One of my Windows 10 machines seems to be catching a lot of that these days. (But it might be Microsoft playing more silly games against Firefox...)
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The simplest way to end monopolies is to remove the ways in which they take advantage of their market positions:
All contracts must be made public.
All sale prices and volumes must be made public.
No exclusivity deals allowed.
No discrimination of buyers except on price and volume.
This is what the free market is supposed to be. Every market participant should have the same information and the same access to the market. The market is very efficient when it's actually free, but free does not mean laissez faire.
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Not bad ideas, though I don't have time to respond as fully as they deserve, so this is mostly just an ACK. The basic idea of public disclosure is good. However my focus would be on the internal accounting information. In particular, public corporations are supposed to reveal that data and my approach would create incentives for competing companies to help validate that data and help make sense of it.
On the side of increased competition, public standards are crucial to my approach. Again, Microsoft is the e
Gaming has the same problem with MFNs (Score:2, Informative)
Really... (Score:4, Interesting)
Again? My, how a decade flies by, and how these corporations never seem to change.
I wonder if audiobooks are included among these? I've noticed a huge jump in price for some recent releases, enough that I just completely passed on buying. Naturally, if I were to sign up for a subscription to Amazon's Audible service, I'd get them for a fraction of the price.
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- Bezos sued into oblivion.
No more items.
So What? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Wow, color me surprised! (Score:4)
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Ehhh. Depends what you want to read. There's tons of free web serials on Royal Road et al if you just want something casual to read. Wildbow's Worm is what, seven thousand pages or something all on its own.
Real actual literature? Yeah, monopoly by virtue of all being published before the web existed as a viable place to churn out books.
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Amazon has nigh-unto a monopoly, and they're committing acts of anti-trust? SHOCKING!
I know, right? Well, at least they don't have the power to censor voices that they don't like ... er ...
amazon doing illegal stuff (Score:1)
Over 50% of All Print Books Sold on Amazon? (Score:1)
"The lawsuit claims that almost 90% of all ebooks sold in the US are sold on Amazon, in addition to over 50% of all print books."
I don't believe this. Not only are there various online competitors there are also brick and mortar bookstores, Walmart/Target, drug stores, supermarkets...
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Re:Over 50% of All Print Books Sold on Amazon? (Score:5, Informative)
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"The lawsuit claims that almost 90% of all ebooks sold in the US are sold on Amazon, in addition to over 50% of all print books."
I don't believe this. Not only are there various online competitors there are also brick and mortar bookstores, Walmart/Target, drug stores, supermarkets...
Just because many others offer the same thing, doesn't mean they're actually selling them well, particularly during a global pandemic where the world's largest book pimp can deliver it to your doorstep, sometimes within hours.
As far as brick and mortar, I just did a quick search in my area for "bookstore". Half the hits were Barnes & Noble, and the other half, were college university bookstores, which remain in business for even more corrupt reasons. Even the larger competitors to B&N, were drive
Thankfully, there's... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Thankfully, there's... (Score:2)
Irony... (Score:3)
The law firm suing here is pretty much RESPONSIBLE for Amazon having 90% of the e-book market, because they sued Apple and basically removed Amazon's only competition.
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Well, Apple was clearly price-fixing too, so it's not like a market dominated by Apple and Amazon really was competitive. Both companies deserve to be sued into the ground.
Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple years ago I bought a Amazon Kindle ereader for the convenience but when I see a book that I'm buying be $7.99 USD for a paperback and $6.99 for the Kindle version I can't help but think there's something wrong. The ebook version should be half to 3/4 the price of the printed version.
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Why? You may not realize it, but printing, warehousing and shipping deadtree books is so efficient these days it accounts for less than 10% of a book's retail cost. So the retail price should differ by only about 10% or so.
So your example it's perfectly priced - the eBook for $7, the deadtree for $8. The physical nature would be about 70 to 80 cents of the price was due to the book printing, so the deadtree version benefits the retailer and publisher by 20 cents over the eBook.
There are costs in publishing that apply to both the electronic and deadtree version - the book still needs to be written, and the author is paid the same regardless if it was electronic or deadtree. Same goes for the editor, the illustrator, the artists (someone needs to do the cover art, and if there are illustrations in the book, they have to be drawn - and many authors provide little more than a sketch on a napkin that has to be made "camera ready"). Then the text needs to be paginated and typeset, and someone has to write the front matter and back matter.
The author's output is a block of text. The author basically only needs to punctuate and split it into chapters. If you're lucky, the author spellchecked.
We've been shipping books around for centuries, the system is highly efficient as the publisher can only control paper, warehousing and shipping costs - the author and other people have to be paid and generally paid well if you want the talent. The vast majority of cost of a book is the people part - the physical product accounts for just a tiny part of the cost and is more than accounted for in eBook pricing.
Of course, physical product occupies physical space, so sometimes it's just easier to liquidate by holding a fire sale to convert stale inventory to cash as well as free up warehouse space for new product. An eBook suffers no such problem - it just occupies some bytes of storage which is cheap and is always available - disk space isn't likely to run out so you don't need to ever run a sale just to clear out space, and you don't have thousands of dollars tied up in inventory with an eBook - Amazon doesn't buy a million copies of an eBook ahead of time and then sell those before they have to buy another million. Amazon just gets paid for the eBook which they then pay the publisher.
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See
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That's just crazy, if the kindle version $4 more than the printed version.
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A couple years ago I bought a Amazon Kindle ereader for the convenience but when I see a book that I'm buying be $7.99 USD for a paperback and $6.99 for the Kindle version I can't help but think there's something wrong. The ebook version should be half to 3/4 the price of the printed version.
Guess that all depends on how much of that MSRP you feel is owed to the person who created it.
From a physical standpoint, it might make sense to price an $8 physical book at $2 for the virtual version. Until you consider that shit prices, roll downhill. Not saying that creators don't already get screwed, (they certainly do), but a 75% discount for merely a different medium, seems a bit shortsighted for recognizing value, and could be a slippery slope that automatically seeks to reduce the value of everyt
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A couple years ago I bought a Amazon Kindle ereader for the convenience but when I see a book that I'm buying be $7.99 USD for a paperback and $6.99 for the Kindle version I can't help but think there's something wrong. The ebook version should be half to 3/4 the price of the printed version.
Just highlights that the price in both cases is mostly pure copyright-driven profit.
Today's Piracy Promotion Campaign (Score:3)
..brought to you buy Amazon and the Big Five.
No reasonable person can possibly defend them or their 70-year copyright.
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Author's life plus 70 years.
I don't think piracy really fixes the problem though. A better solution is to stop consuming them. There's more than enough legal free books to keep you occupied for a few centuries. Not to mention the best books are from authors who had something important to say, not because they wanted to make a profit.
Dutch price fixing, by law. (Score:3)
But ... (Score:1)
Almost Evil. Give it Time. (Score:1)
Easy solution (Score:2)
Just buy these ebooks as used ones to save money.
Oh wait.
Purely coincidence (Score:2)
"We deplatformed Parler! Politicians protect us. It was part of the deal!"
Not just ebooks (Score:2)
MFN clauses are ubiquitous in the travel industry as well. If you offer travel products through a platform owned by Booking Holdings or Expedia Group (which collectively own the majority of the major online travel booking websites) they will insist that your product not be sold at a lower price elsewhere than its sold in their platform.
For example if you offer a hotel room at a given price through a site owned by Expedia Group at a given price, they will prevent you selling that same hotel room at a cheaper