Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal seems to think that Apple and Amazon may be enjoying an unfair advantage in the e-book market and has accused the two companies of price fixing.
Blumenthal has requested meetings with the tech giants in an effort to discuss the deals they have with massive e-book publishers Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Penguin.
The AG says both companies have deals with the publishers that promise them the best e-book prices over any competition.
Such “most favored nation” clauses blocks the publishers from offering discounts deeper than what Apple or Amazon receives. While the deals are not illegal under current antitrust laws, they certainly fall into a gray area.
“The concerns are compounded, and hence potentially more troublesome, since this arrangement appears to be something that will be agreed to by the largest e-book publishers in the United States and two competitors who combined will likely command the greatest retail e-book share,” Blumenthal added, via CNNMoney.
Result for: book publisher
Alexander Skipis, head of the German book publishers’ association, has announced that they publishers plan to launch a lawsuit campaign against file sharers.
Skipis said that they plan to sue “thousands” over copyright infringement and he even went as far as to call P2P file sharing “organized crime.” Taking a job at the government, Skipis added that politicians were ignoring the huge impact piracy is having on the book industry.
In the past, hundreds of thousands of German citizens were sued over movie and music file sharing but last year the courts began ignoring any P2P-related complaints, eventually throwing them out. A new revision to German copyright laws was also intended to stop mass lawsuits campaigns from trade groups.
Skipis is also in favor of “three strikes” laws which would give alleged unauthorized file sharers two warnings before cutting off their Internet.
Result for: book publisher
Amazon has announced that it will be making 5,000 more books available for its popular e-reader device Kindle, adding to the already 120,000 downloadable titles available.
The new titles are available thanks to a recent deal struck by Amazon and the large book publisher Simon & Schuster.
At last week’s BookExpo America convention, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos continued to praise the Kindle and the benefits of electronic books. “That’s one of the great things about electronic books. They don’t go out of stock.” His statement came in response to the recently sold out title “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.” People want it, but it is sold out everywhere.
The Kindle was launched last November and now accounts for over 6 percent of the site’s total book sales. Amazon says it expects that number to increase significantly over the next few years.
