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Ebook pricing and the DOJ. What’s it all mean?
October 8, 2012 | 11:03 pm
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By Brian Howard
Nothing cast a pall over the publishing world like news of the Department of Justice’s e-book price fixing case against Apple and five of the Big Six publishers. While Apple, Penguin and Macmillan aren’t slated to go to court until 2013, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins have already settled, and the effects are already being felt.
What will this all mean? How and why did the case come about? And what can publishers do once the verdict is reached? At the Publishing Business Virtual Conference and Expo, a panel titled “Ebook Pricing and the DOJ: Does the Consumer Win or Lose?” addressed those very questions.
Attorney Molly Boast, a partner at WilmerHale who was part of the DOJ team that worked on the case, breaks down the government’s case and explains the methods used to build it. Marcelino Elosua, founder and CEO of LID Publishing and an outspoken critic of the case, discusses some of the options for publishers moving forward, including ways niche publishers can avoid working with big e-tailers entirely.
These issues and more are discussed in “Ebook Pricing and the DOJ, a webinar that is available on-demand now. (Registration required.)
This article originally appeared on the Book Business website.
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Comments:
Egads how I long for November 6th and the chance to toss out all the Molly Boasts and the others in or employed by the government at lucrative salaries who think they know better than anyone else what the books I’ve labored long to write or edit should cost.
What we’ve seen over the last four years is an attempt to Chicagofy the country. In Chicago, a business, even a small one-author publishing firm like my own, can’t get anything done without lining the pockets of politicians and bureaucrats. We get poorer, so they can get richer.
Doubt me? Check out the Wikipedia entry for the highest income counties in the US
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States
The top three are all suburbs of Washington, D.C, The federal government has been making out like bandits during the Great Recession telling us how to run our lives, how to price our books, as well what medical care we can or cannot get and so forth.
I don’t want to live in a country where Molly Boasts dictate how and at what price I can sell my books or under what conditions (i.e. agency pricing or not). And I particularly resent the fact that I’m supposed to pay the taxes that pay the inflated salaries of such people.
I’d again emphasize those fat government and consultant-to-the government salaries (i.e. this Molly Brown). They’re the ones who growing rich off us and not the often poorly paid people working for most publishers or bookstores.
Note too that 43 previous presidents, many serving two terms, gave us a national debt of $10 trillion dollars. Four years of Obama has grown that debt 60% more to $16 trillion. We shouldn’t let ourselves get distracted. That’s one heck of a lot more important than whether I pay $7.95 or $8.37 for an ebook.
When you write something like I canleirty sympathize but , it makes me wonder why you write for Teleread. If you’re going to take a point of view, and you do quite regularly, it would be helpful to take a point of view that promoted the ease of access to digital content. But when the fights are tough, you become the realistic observer. That doesn’t help.DRM is a business model. It frustrates demand, and it doesn’t stop piracy. It is used to limit the utility of content. We know this. It’s analogous (and in some cases tied to) the access that publishers deny to libraries. We claim that publishing serves a higher purpose and then we deny people cost-effective ways to gain from that purpose.David Rothman founded Teleread for a purpose. I know it is in corporate hands now, but you still have to stand for something. Just reprinting press releases and commenting abjectly is not enough.