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Amazon Sending New Round of Credits to E-Book Buyers as Part of Apple Price Fixing Settlement
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Down payment on iPhone X?I am having trouble trying to figure out where to spend the $0.38 cents I received.
That would be almost one whole pixel.Down payment on iPhone X?
I'm still surprised I've even gotten some decent change from this altogether. $2.10 this time around. Would have been nice to have that at 11 PM last night when I was buying an album, haha.
No need to thank anyone; filing lawyers (states attorneys general and filing class action lawyers) got over $50 million in the settlement. I got $.76........
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That's undeniably true, but from comments I read at the time the publishers were in agreement with Apple's pricing; Amazon wasn't.
I'm a teacher, so cheaper textbooks is a concept I strongly support. It's gotten so bad (upwards of $200 a book) that our college just decided to move to Open Educational Resources, because our students no longer could afford the costs.
I got $3.86 on amazon, and the email saying I would get something in iTunes. Did anyone get anything in iTunes? Not showing it there yet.
Well, not exactly. Apple went to the publishers and said “You can sell on iBooks and we’re taking 30%. You can price a book at whatever you want, but you can’t let anyone else sell it cheaper than what you sell it for on our store”
So.... you know.... price fixing.
The publishers being individually in agrement with Apple‘s pricing wouldn‘t have been an issue, but the case was about them colluding together with the help of Apple to fix ebook prices.
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Maybe the business doesn’t need them if they are unable to compete either by offering a cheaper product or by providing enough added value to justify a premium price.
Expect that wasn't what the suit was about, it was about supposed collusion between all the publishers and Apple. Price fixing with single publishers = legal. The DOJ didn't really have a case, there was clearly a detailed chain of separate negotiations between Apple and each of the individual publishers.
But we're talking about the Department of Justice which is a government law firm, the government in question doing an increasing amount of business with Amazon, so there was also a very clear conflict of interest. Nothing but plain ole government corruption buying government collusion.
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I received the same two emails and am curious as well since nothing has been credited to my iTunes account. I did get $2.86 from Amazon today.
I understand, except all the times before no one was paid out and all the lawyers were!
These credits should not expire. How slimy. Inglorious Corporate Bast****
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Agreed!! The justice system is financially worthless in too many cases.
$ 20.64 here boys.
A round for the house barkeep!!!
You must be joking: the DOJ had overwhelming evidence of the collusion, including emails and phone logs between all the actors involved proving a coordinated effort between them.
“Maybe” sounds like armchair speculation without any basis in fact that ‘maybe’ does not enrich real world conversations.
My family and community are book lovers, and consider ourselves price conscious and interested in researching the directions of markets.
Apple had brought value and Amazon felt sufficiently threatened. Possibly you did not follow that market at the time, but this suffocation of Apple books division was wholly driven by Amazon and its understandable fears.
Apple had brought a better product at a couple dollar markup, which the industry of writers and publishers welcomed. Customers jumped on board, and Amazon became hopping mad.
From this Amazon-driven fiasco and the fury from the industry and customers, all parties learned ... While the books division was essentially dead and gathering dust, Apple shifted focus back to music, delivered premium margins to this industry of writers, performers and producers ... But this time the whole eco-system rejected the attempt to object to these higher margins.
Resulting high competition from (rather than judicially applied restrictions on) the innovator has caused improved products and faster develop cycle times from all music delivery platform players (Apple, Spotify, Amazon). And thank goodness!
Amazon has their own dirty laundry of misbehaving. Just not directly related to this case.
Or maybe it actually does enrich the conversation by providing an alternative point of view to consider, unless you expect everyone to take your equally speculative claim that "this was good for Amazon, not for customers or writers or the industry" as the factual truth when there is no such factual basis presented.
Apple was unwilling to compete on price. It's fine with me, but the alternative is not to fix the price so that you cannot get a cheaper deal from competitors, the alternative is to offer better value and let the consumers decide whether they value your offer enough to justify the higher price tag.
Furthermore, I don't see how Apple "brought a better product" when the vast majority of ebooks were basically the same, Apple's ebooks were and still are not available on any epaper ebook reader and iBooks being worse or better than e.g. the Kindle App is pretty debatable.
Learned what? A very big part of this "high competition" you praise is price, which is exactly what Apple sought to remove from the equation in the ebooks market by enforcing the same price everywhere. Following your reasoning, you should actually "thank goodness" the Apple deal was declared illegal since competitiveness apparently works much better without fixed prices (which should be obvious...).
Furthermore, under the model from Apple there was no such thing as higher margins except for Apple itself. Publishers and writers were earning more under the wholesale model from Amazon. This was confirmed by the publishers themselves as far as I remember. The whole deal was not an attempt of the publishers to earn more money, it was an attempt to keep the perceived value of books artificially high even if it actually meant lower revenues from ebooks.
As a side note, Spotify is accusing Apple of anticompetitive behavior, with an ongoing FTC investigation and a complaint filed to the EU antitrust commission, so at least one of the key actors of the eco-system feels Apple is misbehaving in the music industry too.