Correction: I was clearly missing a key element of the story here, by not being careful enough in reading through the DOJ complaint and not doing better research about something I should have remembered in the first place. As a commenter below clearly lays out, Amazon's prices have come down because of settlements that allowed Amazon to reduce its prices. I take the accuracy of my pieces seriously and I apologize to readers for missing this critical point.
There's been so much writing about the Department of Justice lawsuit of Apple and publishers over the past week, that it's easy to miss a nuance. And I'm no expert in law, which only exacerbates the possibility of misunderstanding, but I'm feeling pretty confident that my household does not need restitution from Apple or the publishers that have allegedly conspired to price-fix my ebooks.
According to the DOJ complaint, the late Steve Jobs told publishers: "We'll go to [an] agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway."
We live in Colorado, one of the states seeking "consumer restitution" for the agency model Apple created with the big publishers.
“Publishers deserve to make money, but consumers deserve the price benefits of competition in an open and unrestricted marketplace,” said Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen...
The problem is: We simply can't prove that we've been harmed. Why? My wife owns an iPad. She buys her books at Amazon. And then she reads them on her iPad. (See comments below.)
It's pretty simple how she does it too. There's a Kindle app. She clicks on the Safari browser, cruises over to Amazon, clicks "Buy with 1-Click," choose "Deliver to iPad" and then starts reading. She let me play with it this morning. (I use a Nook.) I bought her "Girl With a Dragon Tattoo" ... for $9.99.
Apple is casting itself as an anti-monopoly crusader. Said a company spokesperson:
“The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry."
That rings a little hollow, when "competition" always means paying more. But another key defense might be focused on dinner. Writes Bloomberg:
Apple Inc.'s best defense against accusations it conspired to fix e-book prices may turn on its absence from meetings in Manhattan restaurants where publishing executives allegedly worked out the scheme.
Dinner notwithstanding, the scheme didn't work on us, apparently because we weren't out to lunch.
