This story at the Verge certainly rings a bell so soon after these same publishers Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Macmillan just settled with the US Department of Justice for their part in an eBook price-fixing conspiracy they had going with Apple.
The same six are now being listed in a class-action anti-trust lawsuit being brought against them by New York and South Carolina independent bookstores for colluding with Amazon in an attempt to monopolize the eBook marketplace. The story hinges on the use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) by the publishers and Amazon to determine what companies can sell their titles. (So, first they were working with Apple to stop Amazon from forming a Monopoly, but now we hear they were also working with Amazon to form a monopoly. (I guess a monopoly’s good if you’re a part of it…)
Do these publishers look bad, or what? God help them if they ever just competed fairly. I imagine that by now the eBook Revolution would have been adopted throughout the mainstream if the public didn’t have to constantly worry about being cheated by these greedy megalomaniacs…
