U.S. District Judge Denise Cote has granted Preliminary approval to Apple’s proposed $450 million settlement for claims that it colluded with the five major U.S. publishers to increase e-book prices.
The settlement fee is still pending the appeal of Judge Cote’s 2013 ruling, but if it stands, Apple will pay $400 million to consumers and $50 million to lawyers. However, Judge Cote says she was deeply troubled by a provision that could see Apple pay as little as $70 million.
U.S. District Judge Denise Cote says that it is “most troubling” that Apple could potentially be made to pay just $70 million in its antitrust case related to e-book price fixing.
Cote was speaking during a teleconference on Thursday regarding the long-running case claiming that Apple conspired with five publishers to fix e-book prices.
In the original ruling made by Judge Cote in April 2012, Apple was expected to pay $674 million after the plaintiffs reached settlements with the individual publishers.
One year after being found guilty of e-book price fixing, Apple has reached a conditional settlement with the U.S. State to pay $450 million for its role in the price fixing conspiracy that involved five major publishers.
Apple’s settlement could bring $400 million back to consumers’ wallets, reports Reuters, but the court documents filed on Wednesday reveal that the company isn’t quite ready to throw in the towel yet, with hopes that its appeal will shrink that fee down to just $70 million.
While Amazon’s locked in an ongoing dispute with publishing house Hachette — which has resulted in the publisher’s books being pulled from Amazon’s shelves — Apple’s more than happy to take advantage of the situation.
Apple’s iTunes store is currently promoting a sale on digital versions of popular Hachette titles, which includes upcoming books from the likes of James Patterson and J.K. Rowling.
Apple has settled out of court in the latest eBooks price fixing suit brought against the company. It was set to go before a jury next month, with potential damages being as much as $840 million.
The terms of the settlement haven’t yet been revealed, and the opposing side now has one month to request formal acceptable of their agreement by the court.
I just switched from Kindle to Kobo. Why? Amazon. It’s currently extorting publishing house Hachette by delaying orders and refusing to allow pre-orders for certain titles. The exact machinations are secret, but many people agree that Amazon is demanding discounts on ebooks.
I don’t want to see authors forced to get a second job to survive, so I switched. No more Kindle ebooks. I switched to Kobo, which has a great e-ink reader, a deep book catalog, and – most importantly – breakable DRM.
The results are mixed, with ups and downs for both the service and the hardware.
Print media is slowly dying out while digital is taking over by the day. This is exactly why we’ love ’re bringing you 1stFlip Flipbook Creator in our latest Cult of Mac Deals offer.
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Next time you are traveling somewhere or commuting your way to work, look around you. It’s evident that the number of book lovers who have taken to reading on a digital format has risen significantly over the years. In 2011 and 2012, Amazon said it sold 105 books for its Kindle e-reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback books, excluding free eBooks.
Though it has become apparent in recent years that there is a slight fall in the growth of eBook sales (particularly so in 2013), eBooks are still far too compelling to die out, and today we tend to use more than one medium to consume the same thing. So next time you’re hesitating to pull out your Kindle or iPad mini on the bus or train due to the watchful eyes of a “book snob,” just remember that it’s not possible to please everyone, and that there are still thousands of benefits to the electronic book format.
Apple has filed an appeal related to last year’s verdict stating that the company violated U.S. antitrust laws by conspiring with publishers to fix e-book prices.
The appeal — which was filed Tuesday with the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York — calls U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote’s ruling “a radical departure from modern antitrust law and policy,” and argues that it will “stifle innovation, chill competition, and harm consumers” if it is followed.
Apple has lost its latest bid to put court-appointed antitrust monitor Michael Bromwich on hold, with a federal appeals court rejecting Apple’s claim that the monitor’s work was causing irreparable harm.
In a brief order, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said that Bromwich (the former U.S. attorney and Justice Department inspector general given the job of ensuring antitrust compliance regarding e-book price fixing) may continue to examine Apple’s antitrust compliance policies, while Apple pursues a broader appeal seeking to remove him altogether.
When your working relationship begins with the company you’re working with making an official complaint about your “unprecedented” bill, you know things are off to a rocky start.
Cult of Mac reported back in late November about Apple’s dealings with court-appointed monitor Michael Bromwich: the former U.S. attorney and Justice Department inspector general given the job of ensuring Apple’s antitrust compliance regarding e-book price fixing.
Marvin is an ebook reading app for the iPad that gathers together all your EPUB ebooks in one place. The idea is that you can keep your book files in your Dropbox and access them from anywhere.
It’s EPUB-only, which means it won’t work with your Kindle titles, but that’s no problem, because Marvin also has tight integration with the Calibre e-book app for desktop computers, and as all avid Cult of Mac readers know, it’s pretty easy to use Calibre to rip the DRM from your Kindle books and save them to your Dropbox as EPUBs.
Ebook subscriptions are on their way, and I don’t know whether to be happy or terrified. The newest service to let you pay a flat monthly fee for as much as you can read is Scribd, the popular ebook and document sharing site.
The e-book price-fixing saga between the U.S. government and Apple has finally come to an end. After a long and messy trial, presiding judge Denise Cote has given the final ruling against Apple. The injunction isn’t as punitive as expected, but there are still several stipulations that will change the way Apple does business regarding the iBookstore.
Since it’s introduction last year, Apple’s iBooks Author app has only supported the creation of iBooks for iPad, but some new evidence on Apple’s website suggests iPhone support might be on its way soon.
Apple’s added ebook support for the iPad mini and previewed the arrival of iBooks for Mac WWDC, leaving the iPhone as the only major Apple device that can’t view ebooks created with Apple’s proprietary software. However, Serenity Caldwell at Macworld noticed some curious changes to Apple’s requirements message:
While Apple decided to hold out for a court battle — that it eventually lost — five of the publishers involved in the iBookStore price fixing antitrust case have already reached settlements with the DOJ. Two of those publishers, Penguin and Macmillan, are already sending out emails to customers to notify them that they’re eligible to receive iTunes credit, or a check for the settlement.
You may be familiar with Pocket. It’s the shiny, fast, easy-to-use counterpart to Instapaper’s current lameware offering. And you may be familiar with Kobo, maker of e-readers and tablets.
Now, Pocket and Kobo work together, putting all your read-later articles onto your e-ink reader or tablet without a middleman.
Following up on the Department of Justice’s revised proposed punishment from Apple’s e-book antitrust case, Apple’s lawyers filed a response this morning claiming the DOJ is trying to give Amazon an unfair advantage on e-books.
Defense attorney Orin Synder said that the DOJ’s 12-page proposal is just trying to find a remedy that will give Amazon a competitive advantage again. Synder had the following to say regarding the DOJ’s proposal that Apple allow App Store developers to sell e-books through their apps without Apple taking a cut:
In the ongoing antitrust case regarding e-book price fixing, the presiding judge has denied Apple’s plea for mercy over the Department of Justice’s ruling proposal. The DoJ found Apple guilty of conspiring with publishers to raise prices on e-books with the iBookstore, and Apple continues to plead not guilty despite the fact that all of the publishers have settled outside of court.
Not too surprisingly, the five major publishers originally named in the U.S. Department of Justice’s e-book case regarding their collusion with Apple on pricing have now themselves filed a complaint regarding the Justice Department’s proposal to eliminate the use of the agency model in any Apple agreements with publishers for a period of five years.
Publishers like the agency model as it allows them to set prices for e-books, instead of the distributor, as Amazon did before Apple’s own iBooks system launched on the iPad.
Earlier today, the U.S. Department of Justice proposed serious remedies for Apple to abide by now that the company has been found guilty of conspiring to fix e-book prices. When the ruling was issued last month that Apple was guilty, the outcome of the suit was unknown. How would the government punish Apple (for something that Apple has always adamantly denied)? Now we know.
Not only does the DoJ want Apple to stop selling e-books through the iBookstore entirely, but allow rivals like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to sell e-books in their iOS apps. In a scathing response to the DoJ’s proposal, Apple has called the proposed remedies “draconian” and “punitive.”
The ongoing iBooks antitrust case between Apple and the United States Department of Justice took a very interesting twist this morning when the DoJ and 33 state Attorneys General laid out plans to remedy Apple’s wrongdoings and restore competition to the market.
The DoJ wants Apple to terminate all of its deals with book publishers, and refrain from entering into any new ones for at least five years. It also wants the company to start selling e-books from rivals like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Amazon updated Kindle for iOS today with a new feature that will make purchasing Amazon e-books through your iPhone a bit feature.
The new ‘Free Sample’ feature in Kindle for iOS 3.9 lets users search through Amazon’s catalog of Kindle books, download free samples, and if you like it you can email yourself a link to purchase it from Amazon’s website later.
There’s also a new Bring Your Own Dictionary feature so you add medical, legal, or other translation references to define words while you’re reading. Here are the full notes:
The European Commission announced today that it has reached a deal with publisher Penguin regarding the e-book price fixing charges raised by the EU back in 2012.
Like the four other publishers charged with colluding with Apple to fix the price of e-books, Penguin has agreed to ditch Apple’s agency model for e-books that let publishers set prices for e-books while distributors like Apple, Amazon or Barnes & Noble get a cut of the sale.
Apple was found guilty of e-book price fixing by federal judge Denise Cote earlier this month, and it looks like the total bill for colluding with book publishers for the launch of the iBookstore will be pretty steep.
The five publishers in the case – Hachette, Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster – have already paid out $166 million, according to figures obtained by GigaOm. Based on the settlement payments publishers have already shelled out, it looks like Apple might have to pay $500 million to the states and class action lawyers in the case.