Indie booksellers in anti-trust dream over Kindle

In a legal motion that brings to mind Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, three independent bookstores, including tiny Posman Books in Grand Central, have filed a class action suit charging Amazon.com and the Big Six publishers with monopolizing the ebook market. The complaint asks that Amazon and the Big Six be forced to remove the digital rights restrictions from their titles that prevent independent stores from selling ebooks to Kindle owners.The suit, filed on Friday in the Southern District of New York, alleges that contracts between Amazon and the publishers dating back to the launch of the Kindle e-reading device in 2007 have resulted in restraint of trade in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act."Competition, including price competition and choice at the consumer level for ebooks has been, and will continue to be, restrained, suppressed, or eliminated as a result," the complaint states. It also warns of "the weakening or elimination of independent sources" for ebooks and "a dangerous probability that Amazon will achieve a monopoly" in the ebook market.At the heart of the complaint is Amazon's practice of locking up its titles using digital rights management technology, or DRM, that allows ebooks sold on the site to be read only on Kindle devices or applications. The complaint asks for an injunction that would require Amazon and the Big Six—which also include Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Group—to use open-source DRM that would unlock the... Continue reading at 'Crains New York'

[ Crains New York | 2013-02-22 00:00:00 UTC ]

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