The lawsuit alleges that Amazon and the five largest US
publishers, collectively called the “Big Five,” agreed to price restraints that
cause consumers to overpay for ebooks purchased from them through a retail
platform other than Amazon. The “Big Five” includes Hachette, HarperCollins,
Macmillan, Penguin-Random House, and Simon & Schuster.
The lawsuit comes a day after Connecticut said it was
investigating Amazon for potential anti-competitive behaviour in its business
selling digital books.
Amazon declined to comment.
About 90 percent of ebooks are sold through Amazon, the
largest US ebooks seller, the lawsuit claimed.
The case was brought by law firm Hagens Berman and filed in
US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint stated
that Amazon's co-conspirators were involved in a similar litigation before. In
2011, Hagens Berman filed a similar lawsuit against Apple and the “Big Five”
over ebook prices.
Under a scheme of fixing ebook prices at artificially high
levels in response to the threat to their profit posed by retailer's discounted
pricing of ebooks, the publishers entered into agreements with Apple whereby
the publishers all switched from a wholesale model to an agency model.
The successful class action ended in Apple settling for $400
million and the publishers settling for even more.
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