We're finally nearing the end of this saga. Yesterday, Publishers Weekly reported that Macmillan has finalized their e-book settlement with the state and consumer classes. The agreement has been sent to Judge Cote, who is expected to approve it. The final total for Macmillan was $26 million, $20 million of which is earmarked for consumer compensation. The payout is expected by summer. I'm hoping that's also a date for the settlement money due from the other publishers. Last year, I read that Judge Cote would be reviewing the other settlements in February. I haven't heard anything about that ruling, and I assume she's...

It's easy to always talk about publishers who get it wrong, and yes, lots of them do. Bookish, anyone? (Where you can get recommendations, but it's all a one way street, and many, if not most, of their articles are aimed at books or authors published by the houses behind the site.) Tor, an imprint of Macmillan, gets it right. About once a week, they send out a newsletter packed full of information about movies, TV shows and books. Because they are a sci-fi/fantasy imprint, most of the news is about those genres, but that's OK. Most of their readers are likely...

Retailers are finally discounting Macmillan-published e-books - nearly two months after it settled its Department of Justice’s price fixing case. Prices of e-books have been lowered on sites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, according to Publishers Lunch. This includes books such as Silver Linings Playbook, Killing Lincoln and Ender’s Game. That leaves Penguin as the lone publisher that settled with the DOJ as to not have books discounted. Amazon is still hanging on to “This price was set by the publisher” tag on the site for Penguin books. The Macmillan discounts have ranged from about $1 to $2 off the original price. Silver...

Apple is now the lone hold-out. As you may recall, three publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster—immediately settled, leaving Penguin, MacMillan and Apple to fight it out in court. Penguin settled in December, probably to protect their pending merger with Random House. And now Macmillan joins its fellows. Macmillan CEO John Sargent cited financial reasons for the settlement, according to this story on Publishers Lunch: "Our company is not large enough to risk a worst case judgment. In this action the government accused five publishers and Apple of conspiring to raise prices. As each publisher settled, the remaining defendants became responsible not only...

We reported that it was coming, and now it is here: Tor announces, via Tor.com, that all Tor e-books currently being sold anywhere are now DRM-free. Any Tor e-books bought from now on from any retailer that sells them will have no DRM. (Whether previously-purchased Tor e-books include DRM is up to the individual retailer. I tried downloading a previously-bought version of Kitty Goes to War from Amazon and it showed up as still protected.) Separately, John Scalzi discusses the effects going DRM-free has had on sales of his latest novel Redshirts. While he can’t attribute the improvement entirely...

Crain’s New York Business has a profile of Tor’s plan for a DRM-free e-book store. (The article is paywalled, but you can read it via Google News search.) It summarizes the situation with the DoJ antitrust lawsuit, and points to that suit and the success of the DRM-free Harry Potter e-book store as the reason publishers are seriously considering DRM-free options. That said, there is some new material here. Tor founder Tom Doherty and manager of science fiction Patrick Nielsen Hayden talk about wanting to build the kind of “diverse retail economy” you see in bookstores, and are in...

John Scalzi recently published a new book, Redshirts, a humorous take on a particular science-fiction trope most familiar from the original Star Trek TV series. And in keeping with Tor’s pledge to forego DRM, the e-book version is being published DRM-free. (Or at least it’s supposed to be.) In a post to his blog, Scalzi explained how he would like to see readers using this DRM-free e-book—personal use and sharing, yes; limited sharing with friends or co-workers, sure (but not all of them at once, please), not sharing it willy-nilly on the Internet, and bearing in mind that buying...

Tor/Forge has announced, via a posting to blog Tor.com, the impending creation of a direct-to-consumer DRM-free e-book store, to carry SF books from Tor and fantasy books from Forge. The store is scheduled to go live sometime in “the summer of 2012,” which meshes with Tor’s prior announcement that all its books would be going DRM-free by July. “This isn’t in lieu of the existing online retailers, but in addition to them,” said publisher Tom Doherty. “We think there’s room for all kinds of retail models in the growing e-book field—and we aim in particular to...

Even as its parent Macmillan defends its decision to implement agency pricing, Tor is putting that pricing to good use; Tor.com today announced that Tor is putting the e-book editions of three first-in-series young-adult fantasy novels on sale for $2.99 for the next four weeks: Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake, Personal Demons by Lisa Desrochers, and Shadow Grail: Legacies by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edgehill. They’re $2.99 each at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple. A couple of the books look kind of tempting, and I might end up plunking down my three bucks. The only thing...

A week after its previous filing, concerning the Department of Justice antitrust case and settlement, Apple has made another filing—this one relating to the antitrust/price-fixing class action that 31 states have brought against it. (It was a little confusing; I actually had to look up the two filings and compare them before I figured out what was what.) In this filing, Apple insists that it made separate, not-identical contracts with the publishers, and that apart from generating revenue the iBookstore was also intended to “avoid negative margins that it believed Amazon was incurring as it sold certain bestselling eBooks...

Publishing Perspectives has another of those guest-column-cum-self-promotional pieces it runs every so often, this one from Jonas Lennermo, creative director of Publit—the company who provides the e-commerce solution used by Harlequin Scandinavia, as well as several large and 200 small publishers in Scandinavia. Lennermo discusses the benefits of publishers selling their books D2C (Direct To Consumer), bringing up O’Reilly and McSweeney’s as examples. (But not Baen, for some reason. Everyone always seems to forget about Baen.) But while O’Reilly and McSweeney’s are publishers who know how to do D2C with smashing success, they also use proprietary, self-developed systems that...

Hot on the heels of the filing I mentioned yesterday, the judge in the publisher/Apple price-fixing class action has issued a 56-page ruling (PDF). It’s important to note that this is only a preliminary ruling on Apple and the publishers’ motion to have the case thrown out. It doesn’t mean they’re necessarily guilty. As such, it used a simplified set of criteria—rather than questioning the plaintiffs’ facts, as would be done in a full trial, the judge took them at face value for the purpose of determining whether there was enough of an issue to move to full trial about....