Please bear in mind that the allegations presented here have not yet been proven in a court of law.
A court case in New York this week aims to determine whether Apple, the home of the late Steve Jobs, conspired with publishers to boost the prices of e-books when it entered that marketplace a few years ago. The US government is making the allegations. An attorney for the U.S. government lawyer described Apple as a corporate bully that forced an end to price competition and cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
Apple says the government got it wrong and it did nothing wrong.
The government claims Apple (aka Jobs) was unhappy that Amazon was selling Ebooks for low prices and convinced book publishers to allow it to sell Apple-friendly Ebooks for 2-to-5-dollars more. Apple was then guaranteed a 30% royalty on each Ebook sold. So if you were using Apple’s iBooks to upload your reading material, you were getting hosed, they say.
The government’s case is strong. They’re using Jobs’ own words in which he described the pricing model he developed that ensured the 30% cut and admitted that, “the consumer pays more, but that’s what you want.” Even the judge in the case asked Apple to settle because he saw little chance of them succeeding at trial. Five publishers named in the lawsuit have already coughed up hundreds of thousands in settlement fines.
When anyone asks me why my Ebooks aren’t available on the Apple platform I explain a couple of things. First, that I would have to buy a Mac because you can’t get onto the server and upload your book without one. Second, Apple requires all publishers, even those in Canada, to apply for an IRS number and I don’t want the American government sniffing through my financial business. And third, this whole price-fixing thing is a messy business. I wanted to sell my book for $2.99 but through iTunes that wouldn’t have been up to me. It would have been up to the ghost of Steve Jobs.