According to Bloomberg, the US Department of Justice just filed an antitrust lawsuit against Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Apple over the pricing of ebooks.
The lawsuit was filed because the Department of Justice thinks publishers and Apple have colluded against Amazon and other retailers by setting the price for ebooks (as opposed to letting those retailers set the price). Apple’s deal with publishers, as you may know, lets the publishers set the price for ebooks (with a lowest-price guarantee) in Apple’s iBooks store with Apple getting a 30 per cent cut on sales. If the DOJ wins the anti-trust lawsuit against Apple, Apple would lose the low-price guarantees it has with publishers for its ebooks and the whole ebook pricing system would move toward the ‘wholesale model’, where retailers like Amazon could charge whatever they want.
As of now, Apple has not participated in any settlement talks with the DOJ, so it might be looking to fight this out in court. It could get ugly. [Bloomberg]
Hrmm interesting.. it's a whole new marketplace.. so I'm not sure which side of the fence I am on with this one. In a brick and mortar store, you sell the physical product to the retail store at a wholesale price, then that retail store has to choose what amount of mark-up to put on the products for it to sell well enough to make a profit on them etc.
In the digital space though, there aren't any actual physical products to buy.. and the way things are, whether it be on Amazon, iTunes or Google Play.. it's not the retail store selling the products that they obtained at wholesale but instead the creators of those products setting the price and then the marketplace (or advertiser if you like) taking a commission from that sale.
It seems to me that the DOJ are trying to force an old-school, brick and mortar concept on to a digital marketplace..
I just don't know where I stand on this one.
About freakin' time.