{"id":3144,"date":"2013-02-11T16:29:14","date_gmt":"2013-02-11T21:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/?p=3144"},"modified":"2020-07-24T12:46:28","modified_gmt":"2020-07-24T16:46:28","slug":"2013-2-11-department-of-justice-settles-with-macmillan-over-e-book-price-fixing-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/2013-2-11-department-of-justice-settles-with-macmillan-over-e-book-price-fixing-lawsuit\/","title":{"rendered":"Department of Justice Settles With Macmillan Over E-Book Price Fixing Lawsuit"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I remember when this bad boy was $399!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Back in April of 2012, the United States Government sued 5 different publishers for their involvement in fixing e-book prices.\u00a0 These publishers included Penguin, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins. The first four publishers were able to settle with the government and now the tally is up to 5.\u00a0 Macmillan Publishing was the last publishing company to settle with the Justice Department, but the government is now looking for bigger fish to fry.\u00a0 The wildly popular tech company Apple is under the microscope for conspiring with these 5 publishing companies that have now all settled.\u00a0 Apple will be in trial starting this June.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s well known that Amazon has a good stronghold on the electronic book market and with the industry\u2019s profitability and stunning growth rate, there is sure to be some major efforts by competitors trying to get a slice of the action.\u00a0 The allegations which are being looked into include Apple colluding with publishers in order to increase book costs. \u00a0By increasing prices and lowering overall demand, they take some of the market away from Amazon in quite a clever way.\u00a0 Obviously, Apple denies anything of the sort and claims that instead of colluding, they had individual contracts with each one of these publishers.<\/p>\n

Regardless of what happens in trial, the consumer is the real winner coming from this legal battle.\u00a0 Jamillia Ferris, who works in the Justice Department, stated that \u201cJust as consumers are already paying lower prices for the e-book versions of many of Hachette’s, HarperCollins, and Simon and Schuster’s new releases and best-sellers, we expect the prices of many of Macmillan’s e-books will also decline.\u201d\u00a0 It will be interesting to see this trial unfold in June and I\u2019m sure Apple executives and shareholders will be following every step of the trial closely.<\/p>\n

The settlements made between the Department of Justice and these 5 aforementioned publishers were because of a comprehensive 2 year investigation documenting the \u201calleged\u201d conspiracy.\u00a0 Results show that consumers were taken advantage of without them knowing a thing for the most part.\u00a0 It\u2019s estimated that the loss to consumers can easily be in excess of $10 million and possibly much more than that figure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in April of 2012, the United States Government sued 5 different publishers for their involvement in fixing e-book prices.\u00a0 These publishers included Penguin, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[548],"tags":[1201,1388,47,1390,1393,1394,1395,1391,1389,1392],"class_list":["post-3144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lawsuits","tag-amazon","tag-anit-trust","tag-apple","tag-e-book","tag-hachette","tag-harpercollins","tag-macmillan","tag-penguin","tag-price-fixing","tag-simon-and-schuster"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3144"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9303,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3144\/revisions\/9303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lawyer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}