Yahoo Finance Macmillan Settles with DOJ, and Apple Is Last Man Standing in E-Book Pricing Case
According to documents filed with the court Friday (PDF), Macmillan agreed to many of the same settlement terms that HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Penguin already agreed to — but there are also significant differences. Retailers will immediately be allowed to discount Macmillan’s ebooks, in order to “provide for more prompt relief to consumers.” In the cases of the three original settling publishers (HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette) and Penguin (which settled in December), “several months passed before consumers saw the benefits of the settlements through lower retail prices on many of the settling publishers’ ebooks.” In Macmillan’s proposed settlement, however: That “two-year cooling-off period” means that, for two years, settling publishers can’t restrict retailers like Amazon from setting, changing, or lowering ebook prices. The settlement means Macmillan gets a back-dated head start on this period, so it will again be able to restrict discounting in December 2014. RELATED: Ex-Komen Official Slams Planned Parenthood; Fall Releases Most-favored nations clauses are prohibited for five years, but Macmillanhad already removed those from its contracts. RELATED: Pussy Riot E-Book Coming Soon; Fear of an Amazon Monopoly Unlike the other big-six publishers, Macmillan also publishes digital textbooks. Those are exempt from the settlement because the DOJ antitrust case focused only on trade books. RELATED: Booker Prize Shortlist Released; Was NPR's Y.A. List Too White? “Our company is not large enough to risk a worst case judgment” RELATED: Apple's Antitrust Problem May Get Real In his letter, Sargent describes massive legal bills that Macmillan — the smallest of the big-six publishers, and the only one that is entirely privately owned — would have had to pay in “a worst case judgment”:
Macmillan must allow its e-book retailers to discount within three business days of agreeing to the settlement, even if it has not formalized new contracts with retailers…To induce Macmillan to accept this more stringent term, the United States agreed that the two-year cooling-off period for Macmillan would run from December 18, 2012, the date on which Penguin signed its settlement.
As each publisher settled, the remaining defendants became responsible not only for their own treble damages, but also possibly for the treble damages of the settling publishers (minus what they settled for). A few weeks ago I got an estimate of the maximum possible damage figure. I cannot share the breathtaking amount with you, but it was much more than the entire equity of our company.
