Book publisher Macmillan, like Simon & Schuster and Hachette before it, has signed a new contract with Amazon and will return to agency pricing on its ebooks starting in 2015. In a public letter to authors and agents, Macmillan CEO John Sargent also said Amazon’s dominance in the ebook marketplace is a problem and that the publisher will experiment with ebook subscription models as a way to diversify its revenue streams.
Macmillan’s settlement with the Department of Justice in the [company]Apple[/company] ebook pricing case required it (and the four other settling publishers) to allow retailers to offer unlimited discounts on its ebooks for two years. Now the two years are up and publishers are returning to agency pricing agreements with Amazon. Under agency pricing, the publisher sets an ebook’s price and the retailer takes a commission. The negotiations between Amazon and publisher Hachette were highly fraught and public, but Macmillan’s…
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In a new twist in the long running antitrust case against Apple, an appeals court on Monday cast doubt on the Justice Department’s theory that the company brokered an illegal conspiracy among book publishers, and asked instead why the government’s focus has not been on Amazon.
The 90-minute hearing, which took place at the Second Circuit Court in Manhattan, represented a major shift in momentum in a case that has until now gone completely against Apple. On Monday, the three appeals court judges suggested that District Judge Denise Cote might have been too quick to conclude that Apple’s pricing arrangements with five publishers violated antitrust laws.
“Would it not matter that all those people got together to defeat a monopolist? It’s like the mice that got together to put a bell on a cat,” U.S. Circuit Judge Dennis Jacobs told the Justice Department’s lawyer, Malcolm Stewart.
The cat in question here is [company]Amazon[/company], which controlled over…
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