Apple appears to face an uphill battle as it goes to trial Monday in New York on e-book price fixing charges brought by the U.S. government.
The company will square off alone against the U.S. Department of Justice in a non-jury trial presided over by Judge Denise Cote for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who in a pre-trial hearing had already indicated her inclination to rule against the company.
The DOJ filed the antitrust lawsuit in April last year alleging that Apple and five publishers — Penguin Group, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan — had conspired to raise e-book prices.
The publishers, however, have since all settled, agreeing to stop prohibiting wholesale discounts and to pay a cumulative $164 million, earmarked to benefit consumers.
The DOJ charges that Apple and the five publishers colluded to raise prices of e-books, working together to compete against Amazon, which set the price of most e-books at $9.99 beginning in late 2007. At that time, the rising popularity of Amazon’s Kindle made it the dominant player in the e-book market, with about 90 percent market share by 2009.
The New York trial is expected to feature testimony from high-ranking publishing executives, who will face questions on the behind-the-scenes power plays in the increasingly high-stakes world of e-books.
Apple, in a court filing in May, said that the publishers in 2009 had, on their own, pursued a so-called agency business model to sell e-books, whereby the publisher would set the price or a price range for each e-book and the retailer, acting as an agent, would receive a commission on each e-book sale. The publishers also discussed raising wholesale prices of e-books, Apple said in the filing.
Apple said at that point it stepped in to negotiate with publishers to set up its own iBooks e-book store. As an agency business model had helped the company in its App Store, where the developer fixed the consumer price, Apple said it favored an agency model with the publishers that gave it 30 percent commission.
