Apple and five publishers sued over e-book price fixing

Andre Yoskowitz
13 Aug 2011 23:25

Apple, along with HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, have all been sued today over alleged e-book price fixing.
The suit claims the publishers and Apple colluded to break Amazon's discount pricing strategy with the sole intent of helping the iPad compete against the popular Kindle e-reader.

Furthermore, the suit claims that publishers, after discounting e-books for years to push adoption, feared Amazon's discounted prices would set a new (and permanent) low expectation for pricing of the books.
Says an attorney for the class-action suit:

Fortunately for the publishers, they had a co-conspirator as terrified as they were over Amazon's popularity and pricing structure, and that was Apple. We intend to prove that Apple needed a way to neutralize Amazon's Kindle before its popularity could challenge the upcoming introduction of the iPad, a device Apple intended to compete as an e-reader.

The five publishers in question control 85 percent of the most popular e-books and until the iPad's release, new releases were priced at $9.99. They now are priced in a range from $9.99 to $14.99.