Fri 29 March 2024
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The ebook marketplace is about to change…a lot
Now that the DoJ’s response to the public comments has made it overwhelmingly likely that the settlement it negotiated with Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster will be accepted by the Court, it is time to contemplate the changes we’ll see in the ebook marketplace in the next couple of months.
Mike Shatzkin
The settlement requires the three affected publishers to inform retailers working under agency agreements that they can be released from them. Ten days is alloted from the time of the Court’s acceptance for that to take place.

Then the retailers have 30 days to terminate their agreement and then the publishers have 30 days from receiving that notice to actually end it.So the process could be almost instantaneous, if the publishers served notice immediately, the retailers responded immediately, and the publishers reacted to the response immediately.

 Or it could take as long as 70 days from the Court judgment, if everybody used the entire time alloted by the judgment.Assuming that Amazon acts with competence and alacrity in its own interests (and I’d expect nothing less), the entire process could take no more than 40-45 days with them. (Each retailer can be on its own clock.) That should liberate Amazon from most pricing constraints on the three settling defendants’ books by the middle of September.

Read the full report here.

Source: The Shatzkin Files