Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Apple's Appeal In eBook Price Fixing Case

from the time-to-pay-up dept

Mon, Mar 7th 2016 1:58pm — Mike Masnick

This isn't a huge surprise, but this morning the Supreme Court refused to hear Apple's appeal of its loss in the case brought by the Justice Department for engaging in price fixing on ebooks with the big book publishers. During the course of the case and appeals, Apple worked out a settlement, agreeing to pay $450 million -- but only after the appeals process was exhausted. And, that's now happened. As with basically all appeals rejected by the Supreme Court, the court gave no reason. It just denied cert. Meanwhile, even as Apple has now lost the case, it did still succeed in forcing the price of many ebooks much, much higher.

Filed Under: ebooks, price fixing, supreme court
Companies: apple

7 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 7 Mar 2016 @ 2:39pm

For all ya all who just LOOOVVVE Apple products ..
muahahahahah.
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Michael Brian Bentley (profile), 7 Mar 2016 @ 3:55pm

"Meanwhile, even as Apple has now lost the case, it did still succeed in forcing the price of many ebooks much, much higher."

How did it do that? Are the contract terms with the large publishers still incorporating that thing where content pricing on Apple's Bookstore must match the lowest price on Amazon etal?
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Mar 2016 @ 5:13pm

...and I still have yet to buy an eBook from Apple.
It's so much easier to buy from Amazon, strip the DRM, and read it in Books.

I still haven't figured out why it's *easier* to do that than to buy from Apple and use it how I want. Maybe due to licensing restrictions?
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Paul, 7 Mar 2016 @ 8:59pm

"Meanwhile, even as Apple has now lost the case, it did still succeed in forcing the price of many ebooks much, much higher."

As i understand it, the publishers simply negotiated "independently", same end result but Apple was not involved.

95% of what I read is indy or Baen anyway.
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jim smith, 7 Mar 2016 @ 10:45pm

free ebooks
I like this video on how to get low cost to free ebooks.
https://youtu.be/LkjZ-l7A7GI
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Anonymous Coward, 8 Mar 2016 @ 5:37am

Re:
The sentence you quote doesn't necessarily imply that ebook prices *remain* high, only that they *were* high, and that Apple were convicted for pushing them there.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Mar 2016 @ 6:00pm

And we, the book-buying public, can force those prices right back down by refusing to buy overpriced ebooks. There are thousands upon thousands of ebooks out there; just find something reasonably priced to read. Or borrow an ebook from the library.
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