"The most certain of these: The entire “agency model” of e-book publishing, which sees publishers setting in advance the final retail price of e-books sold through online outlets like Amazon’s Kindle e-bookstore and Apple’s iBookstore, will be severely hampered by the lawsuit.
“The industry put a lot of effort into, and cared a great deal about, moving e-books toward an agency model,” said Spencer Waller, a professor of antitrust law at Loyola University in Chicago and former Justice Department antitrust lawyer, who spoke TPM about the Apple case in a phone interview. Waller is not affiliated with the case nor with any of its parties.
The “agency model” differs from the “wholesale model” that publishers commonly use for selling books, doing so in bulk to retailers at a set price, and then allowing retailers to charge whatever they wish to readers.
The government’s antitrust case against Apple and five publishing companies — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, three of which, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, have agreed to settle — alleges that the five companies originally colluded with Apple to shift the industry over to an agency model, charging a minimum $12.99 for new release e-books compared to the $9.99 Amazon was charging under its wholesale model."
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/04/the-likely-outcomes-of-the-apple-e-books-antitrust-case.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire