The Justice Dept. begins investigating eBook price fixing by publishers

[thewayne]

"The U.S. Justice Department's antitrust arm said it was looking into potentially unfair pricing practices by electronic booksellers, joining European regulators and state attorneys general in a widening probe of large U.S. and international e-book publishers. A Justice Department spokeswoman confirmed that the probe involved the possibility of 'anti-competitive practices involving e-book sales.' Attorneys general in Connecticut and, reportedly, Texas, have also begun inquiries into the way electronic booksellers price their wares, and whether companies such as Apple and Amazon have set up pricing practices that are ultimately harmful to consumers."

Yes, the publishing industry is an expensive one to maintain. Those presses, the paper stock commitments, the remaindering and pulping. People costs are high: editors, layout people, I doubt those press operators are cheap, etc. eBooks scare publishers because it totally upsets their economic modeling since most of their physical production is rendered irrelevant. Their production costs drop dramatically even though they add technical people for producing the various eBook formats, their distribution paths change dramatically, and it's an old industry that, like all old industries and most industries period, don't like change. It would be chaotic, and you can't make an economic model of chaos.

The basic problem goes deeper than that, according to some. People aren't reading books as much. We consume more content online, and that's not always books. A recent article that I didn't capture said that television sales declined last year, the second year (not consecutively I think) since TV became available. Just look at the failure of Borders, though there were lots of reasons for that, one factor was people not reading as much. My wife and I have books piled everywhere, and a lot of those come from Amazon because it's not practical to drive 100 miles to get to good new and used bookstores, so eBooks are increasingly attractive.

But eBooks sell. Amazon now sells more eBooks than paperbacks, if I recall the numbers correctly.

Myself, I think eBooks are waaaay too expensive. I will never pay nearly as much as a hardback for an electronic copy. Get the price down below $10 and I'll consider them, if I don't consider the DRM too onerous or find a way to easily strip it out.

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/12/08/0315216/doj-investigates-ebook-price-fixing

Comments

[silveradept]

The publishing industry wants you to think of an electronic product as a physical one, in relation to e-books. The music industry has been trying to establish this as a model for years, and spending lots of money to discourage people thinking of electronic products as electronic products. It's not working for them, and I don't think it will work all that well for publishers, either.