I’m rich! I’m independently wealthy! My ship has finally come in!
Well, okay, maybe not. But anyway, today I got a notification that the latest trickle of settlement money from Apple’s loss in the ebook agency pricing antitrust case had arrived in my Amazon account. To the tune of 38 cents. That’s certainly going to buy me a lot!
Ars Technica reports its writers credit amounts range from 76 cents to the princely sum of $12.02. If you’re eligible, you probably received an email about it today—or else got a pop-up notification from your Kindle app the way I did.
I seem to recall that, during the period of time covered by the settlement, I was buying more ebooks from Barnes & Noble than from Amazon, so I expect my B&N settlement amount to be a little higher. (Maybe I’ll get a whole dollar or two!) According to Barnes & Noble’s ebook settlement FAQ page, it will disburse its chunk of Apple settlement credit over three days starting on October 19th, tomorrow.
The FAQ also explains why we got this late, unexpected disbursement: it’s a distribution of funds left over from some people not bothering to redeem their credits from the earlier settlement disbursement, divided up among those people who did bother. The only problem I have now is that I’m going to have to find something Barnes & Noble is selling that I want to bother spending those credits on! (Maybe I’ll go ahead and take the plunge on the Nook Tablet 7, if it goes on Black Friday sale…)
teleread.org 
In retrospect, while I am not defending Apple’s strategy, the bottom line is the Amazon way turned out to be the highway when it comes to the moribund flat ebooks market. So enjoy your 38¢ and Amazon’s road to nowhere!
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You’re blaming Amazon for the actions of the publishers why, exactly?
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well you can’t blame Apple 😂
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Actually, Apple was the only one who could, legally, be blamed, because it was the only party who didn’t weasel out in the settlement.
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Yeah, that “total credit” for 38 cents illustrate how consumer lawsuits often work out. Consumers get a pittance so small, it is often not worth collection. That gets the sued corporation off the hook. Few jump through all the hoops to collect, so little expense is involved.
Meanwhile the lawyers on both sides reap a fortune. The in-house lawyers for the corporation get justification for their salaries. The suing lawyers get to bill their time at perhaps $400/hour.
And the supposedly harmed consumer gets…. 38 cents.
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In this case, consumers would have been more benefited if there been no (in this case federal) lawsuit. Apple would have been encouraged to get more into the ebook market, giving Amazon much needed competition.
Now consumers are stuck with a market that’s owned by Amazon. And given that state of affairs, the major publishers have no incentive to create a more viable ebook market. That would only put them even more under the thumb of Amazon.
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Exactly! Good to see you have the patience to articulate this. I don’t have any more patience.
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I got $20. A nice windfall. I’m guessing I must have bought a lot of books to qualify.
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This time I got $46.72. The first one was about $70 and the second about $190, and that was not small potatoes The books I bought were before my cataract surgery and during the time I could only read on an e-reader or large print books. Overdrive did not have as many things available as they do now, one reason being that at that time many publishers refused to sell to Overdrive. So I bought a lot of books.
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