It's been my experience that avid readers tend to be the sorts of people who take great pride in their intelligence. And intelligent people, for reasons that are obvious enough, aren't always forthcoming when they encounter complicated subjects they don't entirely understand. I mention this because I suspect that a decent portion of the e-reading community is having a hard time wrapping its collective head around the now-approved e-book pricing settlement situation. And that's a shame, because this particular case offers anyone who's interested a fantastic opportunity to observe the process of free-market capitalism in all its exquisite absurdity. I'll be the first to admit that all the...

An article over at Paid Content proposes an interesting theory: That the recent Department of Justice ruling on the agency pricing issue could actually lead to higher book prices—not lower. This seems inexplicable at first: Only three of the Big Six publishers were named in the ruling, but the others may find themselves lowering prices in order to compete. And retailers are free to discount books as they see fit—packaging them into bundles, and so on. So ... where's the problem? The problem is that there's a clause in the settlement, stating that the retailers' discounts cannot exceed their commissions overall. (No...

Bloomberg Businessweek seems to have been one of the first publications to report that 54 attorneys general in (49 states and five American territories) have collectively reached a $69 million antitrust settlement with Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers LLC and Simon & Schuster Inc., "over alleged price-fixing for electronic books." According to a press release from the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Connecticut, the three publishers "have agreed to pay a total of more than $69 million to consumers to resolve antitrust claims of an alleged unlawful conspiracy to fix the prices of electronic books (eBooks). They have also...

For those of you who might be trying desperately to keep up with the Department of Justice's ebooks case, but are nevertheless finding yourselves falling behind (or falling asleep, even, every time you attempt to plow through another dry-as-tree-bark news report), I'd suggest this recent update from PaidContent. [Title: "DOJ compares Apple and publishers to big oil in ebooks case.] (How can you not read a story with a headline like that?) At any rate, here's the main takeaway: "In a filing late Wednesday in response to Apple and book publishers, the Department of Justice reiterates its claim that agency pricing and...

Well, that didn’t take long. In the wake of the Department of Justice’s response to the hundreds of comments it received regarding its proposed anti-trust settlement with three alleged agency pricing conspirator publishers, PaidContent reports that the American Booksellers Association and Barnes & Noble have sought permission from Judge Denise Cote to file an amicus curae (“friend of the court”) brief in the case. Judge Cote has granted permission to file such a brief by August 15th. The ABA and B&N discuss the sorts of things they’re likely to say in the 10-page filing (PDF) in which they...

Publishing industry consultant Mike Shatzkin has posted a look on his blog at what the settlement terms could mean for the near future of publishing as the publishers who’ve settled put the required contract changes into effect. Assuming things move forward at all speed, the terms could be in effect as soon as mid-September, well in time for the holiday season. Although Shatzkin was a fairly vocal critic of the settlement in past columns, he doesn’t waste any time complaining about the DoJ’s decision to let it remain unchanged. Instead, he talks about the business models publishers might consider...

Today the Department of Justice finally got around to posting over 850 comments it received on its proposed anti-trust settlement with three agency pricing publishers—along with its own response (PDF) to the concerns and issues raised by the comments it received. In summary, the Department of Justice considered all the relevant issues raised by the comments, pro and con, and found nothing sufficient to convince it to budge one iota from the settlement plans it had drawn up. Of those comments, fewer than 70 were in support of the settlement, and the rest were opposed. (However, hundreds of those...

The Justice Department suit against the publishers and Apple for introducing agency pricing is not seeking damages—just a change in the way publishers price. However, the competing class-action lawsuits filed by various law firms and a number of state attorney generals are seeking damages, and therein lies a bit of a snarl-up. PaidContent has an interesting article looking at the matter at great length. The publishers who settled with the DoJ have also been settling with states to the tune of millions of dollars, and this creates a problem for the lawyers who filed the non-state-related class action firms—the...

Senator Charles Schumer (D, New York) has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal calling upon the Department of Justice to drop its lawsuit against the agency price publishers and Apple. Schumer seems to have bought into the Author’s Guild’s rationale, which he quotes and references, painting Amazon as the evil monopolist and publishers as beleaguered innovators who came up with a way to nobble Amazon’s unfair advantage and are now being punished for it. The suit, Schumer writes, “could wipe out the publishing industry as we know it, making it much harder for young authors to get...

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...

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...