European Union expected to accept Apple's e-book settlement
Regulators with the European Union are reportedly set to accept an offer made by Apple and four book publishers to settle an antitrust investigation.
The deal aims to avoid fines for the companies and will allow retailers that compete with Apple's iBooks ??namely Amazon ??to sell e-books for lower prices, according to Reuters.
Apple will be joined by Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan in the settlement with the European Commission. The settlement was first proposed in September.
The European Commission already announced months ago that it was willing to drop its probe into an alleged price fixing scheme by Apple and the four publishers after they agreed to let Amazon sell the same e-books at discounted prices for a period of two years.
EU flags flying in front of the European Commission's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. | Source: European Commission
First launched in December 2011, the Commission's inquiry was related to Apple's so-called "agency model," which allows book publishers to set the prices for e-books sold in the iBookstore under a most favored nations clause. That meant the houses couldn't sell their product elsewhere for a lower price.
If the investigation were to have found the companies in violation of European antitrust laws, they each faced penalties equaling up to 10 percent of revenue from global sales.
The anticipated settlement is similar to the counterpart price-fixing case in the U.S. leveled by the Department of Justice in which HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette recently settled for $69 million. Apple, Penguin Group and Macmillan continue to fight the allegations, with both companies asking for a court trial to decide the matter.
The deal aims to avoid fines for the companies and will allow retailers that compete with Apple's iBooks ??namely Amazon ??to sell e-books for lower prices, according to Reuters.
Apple will be joined by Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan in the settlement with the European Commission. The settlement was first proposed in September.
The European Commission already announced months ago that it was willing to drop its probe into an alleged price fixing scheme by Apple and the four publishers after they agreed to let Amazon sell the same e-books at discounted prices for a period of two years.
EU flags flying in front of the European Commission's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. | Source: European Commission
First launched in December 2011, the Commission's inquiry was related to Apple's so-called "agency model," which allows book publishers to set the prices for e-books sold in the iBookstore under a most favored nations clause. That meant the houses couldn't sell their product elsewhere for a lower price.
If the investigation were to have found the companies in violation of European antitrust laws, they each faced penalties equaling up to 10 percent of revenue from global sales.
The anticipated settlement is similar to the counterpart price-fixing case in the U.S. leveled by the Department of Justice in which HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette recently settled for $69 million. Apple, Penguin Group and Macmillan continue to fight the allegations, with both companies asking for a court trial to decide the matter.
Comments
I'm not arguing for Apple here, in fact, I think eBooks are a joke. There needs to be some sort of "open book format" established (which will probably never happen) where one can move their books (novels) between platforms, whereby the original platform (and publisher) gets the profit, but using your 'open book format login' on any platform shows your books there for your viewing/reading pleasure/convenience.
Being tied to a specific digital book platform is just not right IMO. Apps and text books are different, novels are just text in a specific order.
Originally Posted by Ireland
Price fixing on books the publishers own? I don't get it.
Going after Apple, not Amazon, for price fixing? I don't get it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Going after Apple, not Amazon, for price fixing? I don't get it.
Amazon has price-fixed eBooks? I don't get it.
1) eBooks are a joke? Seriously?
2) EPUB is a free and open standard. Guess who doesn't use EPUB?
Amazon's eBook policies are anti-competive. They were fixing the prices for sale whereas Apple was allowing the distributors set prices.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
2) EPUB is a free and open standard. Guess who doesn't use EPUB?
The problem isn't the book formats (not entirely), it's that the DRM is different for every bookseller. So, even if ePub were used exclusively by everyone, you still have the problem that you can't read iBook Bookstore books on Kindles and you can't read Kindle books in iBooks. It's just like the mess we used to have in music, and the only reason for it is to lock people into a specific seller. The result of it is that if the DRM format of your books ends up unsupported, your books may become unreadable.
Imagine if physical books required a special set of glasses to read, depending on where you buy them. You don't want to have to carry around and keep track of a dozen pairs of glasses, so you buy all your books from the same bookstore. Great for them, not so much for you. If your bookseller goes out of business, or just stops printing books for your glasses, and you break your glasses, now you can't read any of your books.
That's exactly the situation in eBooks today, and why I avoid eBooks with DRM. That pretty much limits me to Project Gutenberg books, and books I scan and OCR. I have no interest in spending my money on books I may not be able to read someday. (I have physical books printed over 100 years ago that are still in fine shape for reading. So, while they may not last forever, they can last a long, long time -- more than a generation or three.)
The DRM mess in eBooks hinders wider adoption by the public, and, at the same time, as they do become more widely accepted, will lead to the same piracy problems we've seen with other content. It doesn't have to be that way.
Edit: Also, the demand for DRM makes it difficult for small players to enter the market, which hinders competition in the bookselling industry.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
1) eBooks are a joke? Seriously?
2) EPUB is a free and open standard. Guess who doesn't use EPUB?
Yes, but that doesn't mean the platforms are iteroperable. They are not. If they all used EPUB nothing would change, because of DRM. All the vendors use different DRM and different logins for their platforms.
Quote:
Originally Posted by anonymouse
The problem isn't the book formats (not entirely), it's that the DRM is different for every bookseller. So, even if ePub were used exclusively by everyone, you still have the problem that you can't read iBook Bookstore books on Kindles and you can't read Kindle books in iBooks.
Thank you.
But you didn't say that the DRM wasn't interchangeable, you said EPUB wasn't open. You might as well say H.264, AAC and anything else that can be DRMed isn't a standard simply because it can be wrapped in DRM.
Quote:
Originally Posted by anonymouse
The problem isn't the book formats (not entirely), it's that the DRM is different for every bookseller. So, even if ePub were used exclusively by everyone, you still have the problem that you can't read iBook Bookstore books on Kindles and you can't read Kindle books in iBooks. It's just like the mess we used to have in music, and the only reason for it is to lock people into a specific seller. The result of it is that if the DRM format of your books ends up unsupported, your books may become unreadable.
Imagine if physical books required a special set of glasses to read, depending on where you buy them. You don't want to have to carry around and keep track of a dozen pairs of glasses, so you buy all your books from the same bookstore. Great for them, not so much for you. If your bookseller goes out of business, or just stops printing books for your glasses, and you break your glasses, now you can't read any of your books.
That's exactly the situation in eBooks today, and why I avoid eBooks with DRM. That pretty much limits me to Project Gutenberg books, and books I scan and OCR. I have no interest in spending my money on books I may not be able to read someday. (I have physical books printed over 100 years ago that are still in fine shape for reading. So, while they may not last forever, they can last a long, long time -- more than a generation or three.)
The DRM mess in eBooks hinders wider adoption by the public, and, at the same time, as they do become more widely accepted, will lead to the same piracy problems we've seen with other content. It doesn't have to be that way.
Edit: Also, the demand for DRM makes it difficult for small players to enter the market, which hinders competition in the bookselling industry.
Great post.
What that in mind, what is your opinion of this post of mine from January of this year?
I'd prefer no DRM at all, because it's always possible for the industry to abandon any DRM system. The music industry has largely abandoned DRM, and there's no reason to view the book industry (or the movie industry, for that matter) as fundamentally different. But I would not want to have DRM tied to an account that I have to sign into where all my books are recorded. Any DRM system needs to work more like SSL certificates, where "signing" can be done by anyone "approved" to sign books, and any reader can read them, obviously there are some differences, and the devil would be in the details.
But, I'm not sure I'd get on board with any DRM system for books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation#Federal_eBook_price-fixing_claims
And we know every claim is legit¡
Originally Posted by Sensi
What a nonsensical comment...
Hang on a tick, it's nonsensical to claim that not every claim is legitimate?
Quote:
Originally Posted by anonymouse
I'd prefer no DRM at all, because it's always possible for the industry to abandon any DRM system.
Yes, but that's where 'the open book format' comes in. It's interoperable. The problem with books without DRM is books are expensive for a tiny file, unlike music, so without DRM everyone would just pirate them. It'd be much easier to pirate then music, people would just e-mail and IM them around.
Originally Posted by Ireland
Yes, but that's where 'the open book format' comes in. It's interoperable. The problem with books without DRM is books are expensive for a tiny file, unlike music, so without DRM everyone would just pirate them. It'd be much easier to pirate then music, people would just e-mail and IM them around.
Music you can e-mail, even… I don't see how a giant book file is easier to e-mail than an MP3.
Originally Posted by Sensi
This is obviously nonsensical to claim that both the US DOJ and an EU commission investigation -which has found Apple and the publishers in violation of European antitrust laws- are illegitimate without backing your fairy tale with anything : indeed. That some delusional people have enough cognitive troubles and intellectual dishonesty to portray Amazon as the price fixer in this case is not just nonsensical: it is nut and ludicrous.
Someone help me out, are any of these words here a reply to what I asked?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ireland
Yes, but that's where 'the open book format' comes in. It's interoperable. The problem with books without DRM is books are expensive for a tiny file, unlike music, so without DRM everyone would just pirate them. It'd be much easier to pirate then music, people would just e-mail and IM them around.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Music you can e-mail, even… I don't see how a giant book file is easier to e-mail than an MP3.
Right, these days, there's no practical difference in size between music and eBooks. (For high res movies, bandwidth and file sizes remain something of a deterrent.) DRM on music was a complete failure and simply fueled piracy. DRM on books will end up a failure, and will hinder acceptance and fuel piracy. Booksellers and publishers will end up losing money as a result.
Unless Kindle has recently changed recently, it's the worst platform in this regard. (And, lacking all interest in it in the past, I haven't really bothered to follow the platform since.) To get books onto the Kindle (or reader apps) you have to (or at least did have to) load them into your Kindle account, an account that Amazon can kill any time they please (and they have done this to people*) and all your content is gone. At least with iBooks I can directly load stuff from Project Gutenberg or my hard drive into my library.
* If this doesn't convince you (anyone) that buying books from Amazon is a fool's errand, I don't know what could. The fact that they can just wipe your account and device any time they please, with no explanation or recourse, seems to be all the evidence required that buying eBooks from Amazon is throwing your money away. And, since only Kindle can be used on their reader hardware, buying that is likewise an exercise in stupidity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sensi
This is obviously nonsensical to claim that both the US DOJ and an EU commission investigation -which has found Apple and the publishers in violation of European antitrust laws- are illegitimate without backing your fairy tale with anything : indeed. That some delusional people have enough cognitive troubles and intellectual dishonesty to portray Amazon as the price fixer in this case is not just nonsensical: it is nut and ludicrous.
Amazon does fix prices, the prices that publishers can get for their books, through its monopoly control of the eBook market. If you don't want to accept that, and that Apple/iBooks and deals with publishers opened the market to competition, for publishers and booksellers, again, that's fine, but you are the one who is talking nonsense. Amazon is leveraging it's size and dominance in a number of markets to take complete, end-to-end, control of the publishing and bookselling industries. As for the DoJ, they haven't "found" anything. They have made allegations. The EU has different laws, but it's not clear that there are any actual "findings" there either, just allegations that Apple and publishers are willing to settle on, because the law and "climate" are different there. But, the only fairy tale being spun here is, as usual, yours. The "Findings" you refer to don't actually exist.
The only result of these legal actions, in cases where governments succeed, is to consolidate Amazon's monopoly position, which, in the end, will harm publishers, booksellers and consumers. This is a myopic, blindered approach to anti-trust law that defies all common sense. It's so contrary to the public good, in fact, that it amounts to circumstantial evidence of either profound stupidity or corruption on the part of regulators. My guess is the latter.
The result of these actions, if regulators are successful, is that Amazon, once it has eliminated all competition in the market place, by being granted monopoly power by governments, will then move on to gouging consumers. They'll also move on to controlling what gets published, and who's allowed to read it.