News Apple Caught Price-Fixing E-Books.

[qspeechc]

I did a search and I'm surprised no one has raised this topic yet.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/11/technology/apple-doj-ebooks/index.htm
http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/23/apple_e_book_price_fixing_trial_set_for_2013

Apple was found guilty of fixing the prices of e-books with several publishers. Honestly, anyone could have seen that, when an e-book cost basically the same, sometimes more, than the paper book. It doesn't bother me too much because I never used e-books, and they always appeared ridiculously expensive to me.

OPINION:I hope something will be done about publishers of textbooks. Paying $50 or $100 for a poorly made book, surely the publishers are making ridiculous profits. All I could find about Pearson, "the world's leading learning company" (in the link below), is that in 2010 operating profit were up 12%, and the "adjusted" operating profit was GB£691m.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...obal-publishing-leaders-2012-pearson-plc.html
Of course this is a different matter altogether. There's probably no price-fixing, just ridiculous mark-ups, and we the sad consumers are simply forced to fork out.

 

[MarneMath]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/10/apple-guilty-ebook-prices-trial

i'm posting this because your links are a bit outdated.

 

[WannabeNewton]

So in conclusion...corporations do messed up things. Why is this news?

 

[leroyjenkens]

How are ebooks equal in price to paper books? I can make a copy of an ebook for free. It requires actual materials and time to copy a paper book.

 

[HayleySarg]

I've never understood the price difference either. The local community college switched many of their courses over to an online format for homework. The book is online as well, and it costs quite a bit and you can't buy an online book used.

 

[qspeechc]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/10/apple-guilty-ebook-prices-trial

i'm posting this because your links are a bit outdated.

Thanks. The links I posted were among the first when I googled this.

So in conclusion...corporations do messed up things. Why is this news?

You could say that about most news stories. "Bad/good things happen, why is this news?"

How are ebooks equal in price to paper books? I can make a copy of an ebook for free. It requires actual materials and time to copy a paper book.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you agreeing with me that it was preposterous, or are you saying you can't believe they were ever the same price?

Like I said, I've never bought an e-book, but reading comments on some websites, people say they can't even share their e-books with other people. I'm not sure what that means exactly, I think it means you can't make an electronic copy, perhaps you can't even print them out. Hmm, maybe I'm not making sense.

 

[MarneMath]

I think in order to make a fair comparison between the cost of an actual book versus the cost of an E-Book, we have to determine of much of the cost is associated with simply the material that book is made from and the actual transportation and storage of the finished product. Intuitively, to me, an E-Book should be cheaper by quite a bit.

The reason why this is news isn't so much the fact that corporations do bad things. People do bad things but a lot of still makes the news. I think any comment belittling this thread because of that fact is facetious and naive, with perhaps more naivety in this case than the former. The fact of the matter is that this is business news. I don't foresee any real human consequence, just political and financial.

What it does shed light is that Apple has enormous power to 'force' major companies within fields to bend to it's will, much like Wal-mart did (perhaps still does) in the 90's. It has (or had) so much power that it essentially 'forced' major publishing companies to put Amazon on a 'level' playing field, but in an unfair way. Financially, this can only hurt the already weaken apple company as it struggles to rediscover itself after Jobs death.