We may be about to witness the final chapter in the Apple e-book antitrust lawsuit. Publishers Weekly reports that the $400 million in refunds Apple has agreed to pay e-book consumers will be disbursed into customer accounts beginning June 21. There’s no word of what happened with “professional objector” John Bradley’s complaint that $400 million wasn’t enough, which was supposedly the last thing delaying that disbursement, but given that the disbursement is set to commence, apparently that objection has been handled.
The money will flow back into the accounts where the books were actually purchased, be they at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple. I expect most of mine to come to B&N; not sure exactly what I’ll spend them on given that I don’t buy B&N e-books anymore. Maybe a Blu-ray or something. Season 3 of RWBY should be dropping soon, and the first couple seasons of that are what I spent the $20 or so I got from the previous round of refunds on. The amount refunded this time around will be $6.93 for each New York Times bestseller, and $1.57 each for other books.
This brings the total refund to consumers over the price-fixing affair to $566 million, counting the already-disbursed $166 million from settling publishers.
And that should finally put an end to the whole sordid affair once and for all.
Note: TeleRead is in the middle of changing over from a .com address to the present.org one. Because of the complications, the wrong byline at one point appeared on this post, actually written by Chris Meadows.
I fear that a lot of Amazon customers may have no clue that they have received the Apple settlement money. Instead of emailing the recipients about this, they have chosen to quietly deposit it in your gift card account. Even when checking that account, there is no mention of the source of this largess. Already on the Kindle forum there are posts indicating that people are calling Amazon to find out why and from whom they have received a gift card. It would seem to me that an email from Amazon to all of the recipients would cause less confusion and fewer phone calls. Certainly I am not complaining about receiving it, for mine was 2-1/2 times the amount of the publishers’ settlement. Only complaining about the stealth and the confusion it is bound to cause.
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Well, they’ll find out they got the money next time they order from Amazon and it offers to let them use the gift card balance to pay for it. It’s not as if not telling them about it doesn’t mean they don’t get it.
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As it turns out, Amazon just emailed me that I had the credit in my account and why. I expect they just wanted to wait until the credit was there before telling people they could go and look for it.
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