US: Apple, DOJ issue closing ebooks statements

By CPI | June 21, 2013

On the last day of the ebooks price-fixing trial, Apple and the US Department of Justice issued their closing statements. In one of the largest antitrust cases in recent history, Apple declared that it “did not conspire with a single publisher to fix prices” when it entered the ebooks industry with the launch of its new iPad in 2010. The DOJ’s closing remarks had a very different tone, however, insisting that Apple deliberately capped e-books prices in the tech giant’s policy to require an agency model of pricing from publishers, as opposed to the wholesale pricing model. The case, being tried in US District Court in Manhattan, has been highly publicized. Most recently, reports paint a shaky picture for the DOJ as testimony largely discredited the regulator’s arguments that Apple deliberately required ebooks publishers to use the agency pricing model in order to compete with Amazon.