Support for Apple in Antitrust Fight

Apple hasn’t had much success convincing federal judges that there was no antitrust violation when it came up with the agency pricing model for e-books with five major publishers. While the publishers decided to settle instead of taking on the government, Apple fought and has lost at practically every turn.

With the case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, the American Booksellers Association, Barnes & Noble, Authors United, and the Authors Guild have chimed in on Apple’s behalf, asking the court to review the case in a friend-of-the-court brief. The document contends that instead of stifling competition, Apple’s entry into the market increased competition.

The brief lays much of the blame on Amazon for the anticompetitive atmosphere that existed before Apple got into the game. It also points to the 2014 dispute between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing as an example of punitive measures taken by Amazon against a publisher, according to a report in Shelf Awareness.

“We authors feel strongly that diversity, competition, and the free flow of ideas are key to a healthy marketplace of books,” Douglas Preston, founder of Authors United, wrote in the friend-of-the-court brief. “The numbers unequivocally show that Apple’s entry into the e-book market increased competition and gave authors and publishers greater choice in how content was delivered to the reading public.”

Odyssey Editions – eBooks without publishers

On Thursday, literary agent Andrew Wylie announced that he and his 700+ authors would be bypassing publishers in order to sell electronic books directly to readers. Through an exclusive, two-year deal with Amazon, this venture, dubbed Odyssey Editions, will produce ebook editions that are available through Amazon’s Kindle store.

Although launching with just 20 classic literary titles this represents many authors’ ongoing dissatisfaction with the terms publishers have offered for ebooks. Publishers and authors have debated royalty percentages as well as which party holds the digital rights to older works published before the arrival of ebooks. Amazon’s efforts to cut out publishers and sign authors directly is also not new. However, these issues may affect how the ebook market develops and the cost of ebooks going forward.

More information on Odyssey Editions may be found in an article here, and some insight into the response from publishers can be found in a NY Times article here.

6,500 authors, publishers, and literary agents opt out of Google settlement

According to recent article from Guardian UK, 6,500 authors, publishers, and literary agents have opted out of the Google Book Search settlement. Those wishing to opt out were required to do so before the fairness hearing on February 18th. As mentioned in a previous posting, the judge did not rule on the settlement due to the amount of information. The judge is planning to write an opinion of his views which could take several months. The Guardian article includes some interesting comments from authors. Science fiction author Gwyneth Jones noted, "The danger to me, and every other writer, is not that our works will be available free online (I offer most of my recent novels free online already. These 'portable document format' novels are the text as I wrote it, and they do my sales no harm at all). The danger of the digital 'publishing’ corporations is their unprecedented access to billions of tiny payments, for product that costs them effectively nothing, at their point of entry. This seems to mean they don't have to worry about any form of resistance at all. I don't like the sound of that, not from anybody's point of view."

How do you spend your commute?

For two years, Peter Brett, a novelist from Brooklyn spent his daily commute to NYC writing a novel. However, he wasn’t writing the book on paper or even typing it on his computer; he wrote the book on his smartphone. An article from Daily News says that Brett wrote over 100,000 words for his 400 page novel while on the subway. His novel was released last year in Poland and England where it hit best seller lists and just last month it was released in U.S. Brett has stopped commuting to pursue writing full time but comments that his word per minute count was higher when he was typing on his smartphone.

Google Book Search Settlement

An article from Book Business Magazine offers some insight into how the U.S. publishing industry could be favorably affected by the Google Book Search agreement. Rights holders will see the benefit from the establishment of a Books Rights Registry that would provide them with revenue from sales, advertising, subscriptions, and per-page printing via a 63:37 split with Google. While consumers could benefit from the ability to search the full text of copyrighted books and then choose from purchasing options such as digital, hard copy, and by page. Schools and libraries would also benefit from Google’s subscription service offerings. What is perhaps less clear is how this will affect booksellers that occupy the retail space – from the local college store to Amazon, this could be a potential challenge to handling retail transactions. Others also see this agreement as potentially disrupting competition. According to an article on Bookseller.com, the UK Booksellers Association warns that if the agreement is brought to the U.K. it could create “a de facto monopoly” by removing competition from the market and denying customers a choice. The association adds, "This recent agreement, if ever adopted in the UK and Ireland, would have a hugely damaging effect on the publishing and bookselling industry and, consequently, for authors and the public as well."