At the recently concluded London Book Fair, the chief subject of discussion wasn’t celebrity book advances — it was the US Department of Justice (DoJ) antitrust suit against Apple and five major book publishers. The DoJ lawsuit alleges restraint of trade and collusion among five publishers and the computer giant after Apple introduced what it called “the agency e-Book model”, in effect allowing publishers to set e-book prices higher than many sellers (including Amazon and Barnes & Noble) might have liked. Three publishers settled almost immediately; two, Macmillan and Penguin, are exploring their legal options, and opinion is divided on whether Apple will go the legal distance or try to settle. Some industry experts think the lawsuit will be settled soon; a few think that Apple might be able to successfully fight the charges of collusion.
But the real issues the lawsuit brings up go much deeper than the question of what the industry’s top CEOs discussed in the privacy of The Chef’s Wine Cellar and whether that breached the US’ antitrust laws. The e-book market is growing at such a pace that some insiders call conventional publishing “legacy publishing”; even in emerging markets like India, the rising sales of devices like the iPad and the Galaxy Tab promise to fuel major growth in e-books. It is unclear who owns this market, though a safe bet would be to look at those who own the world’s most popular e-reading devices — the iPad and the Kindle, currently. Apple’s insistence on proprietary software has irked users who have to balance the tech giant’s dominance and ubiquity against the fact that it dilutes owners’ rights to their own books and music. Transferring music off iTunes, for instance, requires serious hacking skills, and many feared that Apple would use stringent digital rights management (DRM) to control e-books. If Apple loses the lawsuit, the biggest beneficiary would be Amazon, which has a history of locking readers into its own proprietary e-reading device, the Kindle. Between the iPad (and any iBooks model) and the Kindle, the Apple-Amazon dominance of the market is worrying for publishers, readers and authors alike.
In effect, the technology that was supposed to make it easier for readers to access books at cheap prices anywhere in the world, and to allow small publishers a level playing field, has done exactly the opposite. Publishers wedded to the old-world model of selling book rights by geographical territory have little escape from this when two major players – Apple and Amazon – insist on protecting territorial dominance. This also, as the Australian publishing industry has argued for years, continues to lock the entire industry into a colonial mindset dominated by two markets — the UK and the US. Though many have hailed the DoJ lawsuit as a victory for users, this is by no means certain. Preventing Apple from artificially raising e-book prices will ultimately benefit Amazon, the largest retailer of e-books — and allow Amazon even more dominance in the e-reading market. But what the DoJ lawsuit might accomplish is to force the industry to look more carefully at e-books, and to stop trying to fit a model on them that was developed for and suited to paper books.