(Erstes) Urteil im E-Book-Rechtsstreit gegen Apple
Die E-Book-Antitrust-Klage gegen Apple habe ich bislang (weitgehend) ausgeblendet. Zu Unrecht. Fünf Verlage als Spielball zwischen zwei konträren Verkaufsphilosophien (von Amazon und Apple), Preiseinblicke wie wenig der eigentliche Autor an seinem Werk verdient sowie unüberlegte Steve-Jobs-Zitate ziehen den Fall spannender auf als (von mir) ursprünglich angenommen.
Mit dem gefällten Urteil in dieser Woche (gegen das Apple bereits Berufung einlegte), ist jetzt ein guter Zeitpunkt für einen Halbzeitbericht gekommen.
That’s one of the counterintuitive aspects of this situation. Yes, customers paid more — as noted, prices rose nearly 19 percent more per book overall after the agency model went into effect. But publishers earned less per book, with some predicting the overall drop in earnings would be as much as 17 percent.
Under this strategy, publishers still made a profit on each book—Amazon was taking the loss, not them—but publishers still hated Amazon’s $9.99 price. They feared that once Amazon gained a stranglehold over the e-book market, it would force publishers to lower their wholesale prices. […] And if it got big enough, Amazon could do something even worse: It could replace publishers entirely, signing deals with authors that lowered book prices and gave writers a bigger cut on each book sold. (In fact, that’s exactly what Amazon does under its Kindle Direct program.)
The import of Jobs’s statement was obvious. On January 29, the General Counsel of S&S [Simon & Schuster] wrote to [Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn] Reidy that she “cannot believe that Jobs made the statement” and considered it “[i]ncredibly stupid.”