SAN FRANCISCO – Hagens Berman, a consumer rights class-action law firm, today announced it has filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit claiming that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and five of the nation’s top publishers, including HarperCollins Publishers, a subsidiary of News Corporation (NASDAQ: NWSA), Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group Inc., a subsidiary of Pearson PLC (NYSE: PSO) and Simon & Schuster Inc., a subsidiary of CBS (NYSE: CBS), illegally fix prices of electronic books, also known as e-books.Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the lawsuit alleges that the publishers and Apple colluded to increase prices for popular e-book titles to boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing.
According to the suit, publishers believed that Amazon’s wildly popular Kindle e-reader device and the company’s discounted pricing for e-books would increase the adoption of e-books, and feared Amazon’s discounted pricing structure would permanently set consumer expectations for lower prices, even for other e-reader devices.
About time imo, this has been getting ridiculous.
― Autumn Almanac, Tuesday, 9 August 2011 23:45 (fourteen years ago)