Diary of a Mad Editor

Perhaps some of you have heard about the class action lawsuit being filed against Apple and the five publishers who first jumped on the Apple bandwagon with the agency pricing model for e-books. The suit filed by Hagens Berman alleges price-fixing in a deliberate attempt to hurt Amazon.

Given my early criticism of the agency model and my own anti-Apple opining, you might think I’m siding with the law firm on this one. You’d be mistaken. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see the law suit go against Apple and the publishers named in the suit if it means getting rid of the agency model. I simply don’t agree that there is any evidence of collusion. I do not believe that there was this secret meeting between Apple reps and the big five publishers in which they cooked-up the agency scheme.  Publishers aren’t bright enough to come up with that plot and Apple is smart enough to know that. So why would they have to conspire to get what they want?  If you’re some two-martini buy your cao cigars online type looking at a dwindling balance sheet with Amazon controlling your destiny, you’re going to take any deal you think will save your ass.  No matter that Amazon wasn’t really hurt by the move because they smartly responded by lowering cost of the Kindle and sweetening the pot for self-publishers. Apple laughed all the way to the bank as well. And, while publishers didn’t do that badly, their decision didn’t slow the downward slide in mass market sales.  The bottom line, here is that the only ones who got conned by the agency model were the publisher who are being sued. They benefited, but not quite as much as Apple, Amazon or the digital pirates who expanded their market due to the price jump on some books.