Evil Apple sued

Evil Empire sued

According to many recent stories in the news, Apple Inc. and five major book publishers were
recently sued by the Department of Justice (:DOJ), for conspiring and manipulating e-book
prices.
The civil antitrust lawsuit filed in the District Court for the Southern District in New York
accused Apple, HarperCollins Publishers Inc, Simon & Schuster Inc, Hachette Book Group,
Macmillan and Penguin Group of htching a secret plot to inflate e-book prices aimed at curbing
Amazon’s dominance in the e-book market.
The plan by Apple and others probably began when Amazon launched its e-book reader Kindle.
Amazon began to offer e-books at a lower discounted price ($9.99) much to the ire of publishers,
whose retail businesses suffered significant market share loss. The move paid off for Amazon, as
the company grabbed 90% of the e-book market within a couple of years since the launch of
Kindle.
Poor Apple! I really feel sorry for this company that has had so much bad press recently - Not!
I guess I’m one of the few but maybe growing group who view Apple as the modern day version
of the Evil Empire.
Every few months it comes out with the new and improved version of its iPad or its cell phone or
its tablet. From its computers on down, everything it sells is expensive and produced with cheap
foreign labor, and made old within less than a year.
I don’t own anything made by Apple, primarily because of what they charge for their products
and I am not one to throw away perfectly good electronics just because there is something newer
with a few more bells and whistles.
But this ebook pricing scandal really gets my goat because I know what it costs to create and sell an ebook - next to nothing after the author completes the text.
Take my books for an example.
My vampire novels and my outdoor hiking guide retail on Amazon and many other locations for
$15.99 in print. As an ebook, they retail for $4.99. On the print books I earn on average about
$6.82 and in the ebooks I earn about $3.47.
Yes, I make less on the ebooks but I sell more than twice as many ebooks than I sell print.
This seems fair and I really don’t understand the greed of major publishers and authors who are
already making a fortune.
Speaking of major authors, I won’t buy anything from them and haven’t since buying Potter
books for my granddaughters.
As a reviewer for Allbooks Review, I have read many good books by authors who are not famous
and don’t feel the need to line the pockets of those who are living high on the hog.
I say, support the small fry and screw the big fish.