Amazon, Apple Investigated for Potential Anticompetitive eBook Deals
Amazon, Apple Investigated for Potential Anticompetitive eBook Deals
Posted 08/03/2010 at 9:11am
| by Paul Lilly
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Connecticut's Attorney General's Office is looking into possible shenanigans between the country's largest eBook publishers and two heavyweight dealers, Amazon.com and Apple, Inc. According to Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, both Amazon and Apple have reached agreements with several eBook publishers ensuring that they each receive the best prices over the competition.
"These agreements among publishers, Amazon and Apple appear to have already resulted in uniform prices for many of the most popular eBooks -- potentially depriving consumers of competitive prices," Blumenthal said. "The eBook market is set to explode -- with analysts predicting that eBook readers will be among the holiday season's biggest electronic gifts -- warranting prompt review of the potential anti-consumer impacts."
Blumenthal went on to say that Amazon and Apple own the lion's share of the eBook market, "allowing their most-favored nation clauses to effectively set the floor prices for the most popular eBooks." These kinds of agreements, Blumenthal contends, inevitably lead to coordinated pricing and discourages discounting.
More here, including the letters Blumenthal sent to Amazon and Apple.
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JohnP
August 03, 2010 at 8:06pm
Amazon HAD this nice monopoly on the e-book market but that will evaporate soon. As Amazon is trying to keep its propritary .azw e-book format, Jeff Bezos has said "NO' to E-Pub books. A year from now, amazon will be slogging along with the rest of the crowd of e-book readers.
That is the problem with lawsuits, they take so dang long. I loved how MS got dinged about IE monopoly long after Netscape had completely evaporated.
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