Amazon issued the settlement refund in the form of a Kindle book store credit that is automatically applied to a customer's Amazon account. The credit is valid for one year and must be redeemed before 03/31/2015.
Good news! You are entitled to a credit of $27.55 for some of your past Kindle book purchases. The credit results from legal settlements reached with publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin in antitrust lawsuits filed by State Attorneys General and Class Plaintiffs about the price of eBooks.
You don't have to do anything to claim your credit, we have already added your credit to your Amazon account. We will automatically apply your available credit to your next purchase of a Kindle book or print book sold by Amazon.com, regardless of publisher. The credit applied to your purchase will appear in your order summary. If your account does not reflect this credit, please contact Amazon's customer service.
For more information about the settlements, please visit www.amazon.com/ebooksettlements
Your credit is valid for one year and will expire after 03/31/2015. If you have not used your credit, we will send you another email 90 days before it expires to remind you that it is still available.
Thanks for being a Kindle customer.
The Amazon Kindle Team
Select book sellers like Barnes & Noble and Sony are expected to begin issuing similar credits today, with postcard checks from other booksellers being sent via mail to consumers starting March 27, 2014. You can find information on book retailers and their refund payment methods on the e-book settlement web site.
Apple also was included in the antitrust lawsuits, but refused to settle. After being found guilty in federal court of conspiring to artificially inflate e-book prices, Apple was barred from entering into anticompetitive deals with content providers and must submit to court-appointed compliance monitoring. The Cupertino company also could owe as much as $500 million in damages, which are yet to be assessed.
Apple recently appealed the verdict, calling the plan a "draconian and punitive intrusion into Apple's business, wildly out of proportion to any adjudicated wrongdoing or potential harm."
An in store credit? Amazon benefits from the DOJ again!
Exactly. They'll issue $1M in "refunds" and gain 1.5M in sales as a result. Way to go, DOJ. You really showed them! :rolleyes:
So let me get this straight. People VOLUNTARILY purchase an eBook, under THEIR OWN FREE WILL, and somehow they're aggrieved and entitled to compensation. Interesting.
When they pay higher prices because of illegal activity, yes.
Are Amazon only obliged to do this for US customers, or will it apply world-wide?
This is a case where the original article was very poorly written.
As far as I am aware, this is only for US customers.
Furthermore, it only applies to people who purchased eBooks published by certain publishers (who were convicted of wrongdoing) during certain dates. If you purchased outside those dates, the publishers allegedly did nothing wrong of the statute of limitations applies.
Amazon is not the party that is paying for the refunds, instead it is the publishers who are paying for the refunds, as they colluded with Apple to force Amazon to raise prices. Now on could say that Amazon should have stuck to it's guns, but had it done so, there would have been a lot of publishers that refused to sell on Amazon, which would have made them have a much weaker position now that the playing field is being leveled again.
Now, a few months back Amazon sent an email stating that they would be issuing these credits and that you had the option to receive a check instead. As I recall though, they offered to add additional credit to what you were entitled to if you chose to receive it as a credit. I don't remember how much extra it was, but I would think it was some percentage based number. So, unless you confirmed that you wanted a check, you agreed to receiving the credit. This is why they are allowed to issue the credit that is only valid for books.
Also, keep in mind Amazon was not one of the companies that was in on the collusion, they are simply facilitating the refunds. They actually could be considered a victim in this whole mess as well, considering Apple and the publishers colluded to change the entire eBook business model that Amazon had long established and they did this because eBooks were cutting into physical book sales, which is why the prices for eBooks are now about (or higher) than what the physical books are.
The difference is that customers are getting money they were owed. And many of them won't claim it.
Amazon is getting additional money on top of the profits that they earned during agency pricing. They basically get paid twice.
For the best sellers in question, instead of losing $2.50, Amazon made 30% ($4-$5), and now they get the refund money from the publishers and the additional sales generated as a byproduct of customers spending more than their refund amount.
Pretty good deal considering they weren't a part of the lawsuit.
Good question.
Well we don't really know all the details of how amazon is getting paid so it's hard to determine if they are really making out as good as you suggest. And not defending amazon but they also incur additional labor and shipping costs on physical books anyway. Not that those things are huge costs in this equation.
So let me get this straight. People VOLUNTARILY purchase an eBook, under THEIR OWN FREE WILL, and somehow they're aggrieved and entitled to compensation. Interesting.
Clearly you don't understand the ramifications of the situation.
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I still do not see what Apple did that was wrong. Why is their business model acceptable for music and apps, but not for books? I am sorry to keep harping on this, but I have not seen a satisfactory answer to my simple question. Apple says, "charge what you will like, we take 30%." In theory, the book company could give the books away and Apple would get nothing like in the app store. And in the music store where you are limited to what you can charge, that would seem worse that what is going on with the books. So why is apple guilty and of what? The penalty does not matter they could pay $1b fine and not notice it, but what does matter is the principle as this could be a very slippery slope.
Because their model isn't what was in question - it's how they went about their "deal" making with the publishers.