The Atlantic reports on a new 20-page legal brief objecting to the terms of the Department of Justice settlement, filed by nine major independent publishers: Abrams Books, Chronicle Books, Grove/Atlantic Inc. Chicago Review Press, Inc, New Directions Publishing Corp., W.W. Norton & Company, Perseus Books Group, the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, and Workman Publishing. These publishers object to the settlement on similar grounds to everyone else who has objected—it will allow Amazon to prosper at the expense of publishers, and is thus contrary to the public interest. The publishers complain that the DoJ never talked to independent...

The time to submit comments to the DoJ about the proposed price-fixing settlement has ended, and the Authors Guild filed its own comments on Monday. Publishers Weekly has a post containing the full text of the rather lengthy open letter from Executive Director Paul Aiken, as well as some commentary. There’s not a whole lot that’s new in the Authors Guild’s position from the various editorials of theirs we’ve covered over the last few months, but it does go into a considerable amount of detail as to what they see as Amazon’s domination of many areas of the publishing...

Here are a couple of updates on the DoJ vs. publishers + Apple antitrust suit. From CNet comes the story of a small legal tiff between the DoJ and the publishers who did agree to settle. Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster—publishers who accepted the DoJ’s proposed terms—have filed papers asking a court to declare them “non parties” to the upcoming lawsuit. This would mean they wouldn’t be obligated to provide discovery—that is, turn over documents and other evidence to lawyers for the DoJ and the publishers plus Apple who are being sued—unless some other party to the...

American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher has posted the text of his letter to the Justice Department commenting on the proposed antitrust settlement with the three Agency Five publishers who agreed to settle. As with the recent Barnes & Noble filing, Teicher concentrates on the harm that such a settlement would allow Amazon to do to its competition—in this case the independent bookstores that make up the ABA. Teicher points out that agency pricing is the only thing that allowed independent bookstores selling e-books through the ABA’s IndieCommerce subsidiary (currently using Google Books’s reseller program, but changing to another...

Publishers Weekly reports that as of June 12th, the Department of Justice had received over 150 letters relating to the proposed price-fixing charges filed against Apple and the Agency Five publishers, totaling over 200 pages of material. In a filing, the DoJ said it expected “a similar or greater” amount of additional letters by the time the comment period ends on June 25th, and asked Judge Denise Cote to allow it to forego the usual print publication of the letters in the Federal Register. The DoJ would instead post the letters to the antitrust division website and post the address...

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...

I previously discussed publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin’s letter to the DoJ concerning the antitrust investigation against Google. Here’s one from about as far to the other side as you can go: self-publishing booster and blogger Joe Konrath. In his letter, Konrath accuses the publishers of keeping e-book prices high to protect sales of their high-margin hardcover books, and opines that Amazon is the only one really fostering competition. He also accuses the Authors Guild and Association of Authors’ Representatives of working not for authors as their names imply, but for publishers. Konrath links to several of his...

Publishing-industry consultant Mike Shatzkin has posted the letter he has sent the Department of Justice in regard to its proposed settlement with three of the five original Agency publishers. Shatzkin spends much of the letter establishing his credibility as a consultant, then points out the two fundamental problems he sees with the settlement. First is the one that he mentioned in his column the other day—if publishers sell directly to the consumer, they can’t sell at full price without Amazon eating their lunch, and if they discount Amazon may insist its own prices should be based on the publishers’ discount price...

On the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum has a rebuttal to a number of recent posts about e-book production costs and price, including the post by Mathew Ingram that I covered here. Though the article is replete with quotes and counter-arguments, but the central thrust seems to be that publishers ought to be able to charge what they want to—but they really should be wanting to charge less. At base, copyright holders have the right to ask what they want to get for their work (which is why they were so concerned about Amazon selling ebooks...

Introduction There are two major updates in the DOJ lawsuit.  An additional 17 states have sued the publishers and Apple.  Judge Denise Cote’s filed a denial of Apple, Penguin, and Macmillan’s motion to dismiss.  You may want to read the Primer here if you haven’t already before going forward. States Attorneys General Amended Complaint 1)  An additional 17 states have joined the existing states that have filed suit against the major publishers and Apple bringing the total number up to 31. Those states include: Texas, Comiecticut, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York,...

The hits just keep on coming. On PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen writes about a new filing in a class-action lawsuit against the agency pricing publishers that reveals some previously redacted evidence in the case shedding light on the agency pricing negotiations. This is the suit in which a number of states (now up to 31 including DC and Puerto Rico) seek monetary damages, in addition to the DoJ’s class action settlement. In one case, Macmillan CEO John Sargent asked Apple if they might consider relaxing their 30% take for new-release “hardcover” e-books to help ease the pain of their...