{"id":1520,"date":"2012-04-11T21:52:42","date_gmt":"2012-04-12T01:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/?p=1520"},"modified":"2012-04-11T21:52:42","modified_gmt":"2012-04-12T01:52:42","slug":"lawsuit-us-vs-apple-and-the-book-publishers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/2012\/04\/11\/lawsuit-us-vs-apple-and-the-book-publishers","title":{"rendered":"Lawsuit: US vs. Apple and the Book Publishers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The official complaint document<\/a> (PDF) is short and easy to read1<\/a><\/sup>. But if you don’t feel like reading it, and haven’t read any of the many articles about it, here you go:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Pricing model for e-books is the same as physical books: retailers buy at wholesale prices and set the retail price. This allows for competition between retailers and lower prices for consumers.<\/li>\n
  2. Amazon.com releases the Kindle and starts selling e-books\u2014often at a loss\u2014for $9.99.<\/li>\n
  3. Book publishers do not like this and think this retail pricing will bring down the wholesale price of both digital and physical books.<\/li>\n
  4. Apple is about to release the iPad and wants to strike a deal with book publishers for 30% of every e-book sold through iBooks.<\/li>\n
  5. Apple and Book Publishers conspire to switch the industry from a wholesale pricing model to an agency pricing model, allowing Book Publishers<\/em> to set the retail price of books2<\/a><\/sup>.<\/li>\n
  6. Result<\/strong>: Book Publishers don’t need to worry about prices dropping and Apple won’t need to compete with Amazon’s prices.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    And check out this quote from the complaint:<\/p>\n

    As Apple CEO Steve Jobs described his company’s strategy for negotiating with the Publisher Defendants, “We’ll go to [an] agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what [the Publisher Defendants] want anyway.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Yikes.<\/p>\n

    \n
    <\/div>\n
      \n
    1. Unlike many other pieces of legal writing. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
    2. Not just for Apple, but for all retailers, including Amazon. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      The US Government is suing Apple and several book publishers for conspiring together to raise the price of e-books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[587,75],"tags":[56,72,638,224],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p123kB-ow","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1520"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1524,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions\/1524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}