Andrew Albanese, my editor at Publishers Weekly, has been tracking the antitrust action the DoJ brought against the big six publishers and Apple over price-fixing very carefully, and he's written a great-looking, DRM-free ebook about it called "The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon, and the Big Six Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight." Here's what he had to say about it:
It is mostly about the backstory of the case, how publishers' antipathy to $9.99 led them to what turned out to be a pretty fateful decision. It is also available in all the major e-book stores, Sony, B&N, Apple, and Amazon. Amazingly, Amazon is featuring it on their Singles home page here in the U.S.
So one note that might be of interest to you, I was surprised to learn in writing this essay how little the publishers negotiated their initial e-book retail terms back when the e-book market was just beginning. And, more to the point, that the thought they did put into e-books was all related to the negative aspects of digital: how to stop piracy, DRM, controlling unauthorized use. This is kind of where this whole legal saga begins. When Amazon came to launch the Kindle in 2007, the publishers were so focused on the bad things that digital might bring that they never really considered, hey, what if this e-book thing really works? What if this Kindle thing takes off?
Remember, at the time Amazon launched the Kindle, the publishers were stumping for the Google Settlement, so their attention was focused more on stopping the digitization and indexing of long out-of-print books that were making money for no one. As a result, they barely negotiated their initial financial terms with Amazon. Amazon officials testified that, in some cases, they just accepted the financial terms publishers had already proposed for e-books, while publishers mostly sought to address DRM, and security concerns. No one apparently stopped to ask Amazon, “Oh, by the way, how much are you planning to charge consumers for our e-books?”
It is easy to say in hindsight, but the major publishers’ fear of digital piracy had kept them from considering the prospects of digital success. And, of course, all of this was exacerbated by the fact that the Kindle was a closed platform, so, the more successful the Kindle became, the more power the company had over the publishers' customer. As you once wrote, the DRM and security they'd insisted on became a whip to beat them with. Another interesting chapter in the way DRM has impacted the publishing industry.
