The news that Faber in the UK has partnered with a company called Firsty Group to offer direct-to-consumer services to their distribution clients again calls the question about publishers selling direct. In my recent post about the likely outcome of the DoJ settlement being accepted by the Court, I said I was re-thinking my admonition […]
The ebook marketplace is about to change…a lot
Now that the DoJ’s response to the public comments has made it overwhelmingly likely that the settlement it negotiated with Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster will be accepted by the Court, it is time to contemplate the changes we’ll see in the ebook marketplace in the next couple of months. The settlement requires the […]
Royalty Share CEO Bob Kohn alleges DoJ violates the Tunney Act
According to Bob Kohn, an attorney and the CEO of Royalty Share, the Tunney Act very clearly requires that the Justice Department publish (and it was thought originally that this meant “print”) all the public comment they got within the alloted comment period. Kohn says that’s what the law states clearly, as upheld in a […]
Auletta’s New Yorker piece is good orientation for thinking about the DoJ case
Writing about the lawsuit the DoJ has instituted against Apple and five leading publishers is very hard. It’s a big issue and doing it justice requires navigating two very large and complex bodies of knowledge: anti-trust law and the trade book publishing business. Whenever I write about it, I feel handicapped because I don’t know […]
If the government makes agency go away
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department has notified the Agency Five (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) and Apple that it plans to sue them for colluding to raise the price of electronic books. I have no standing to comment on the law here. But if this does mean the […]