Apple Pays Back E-Book Buyers Following Settlement
June 21 2016 - 5:16PM
Dow Jones News
By Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Check your inbox -- and your spam filter -- because there might
be money in there. Having settled an antitrust lawsuit, Apple Inc.
is refunding what you may have overspent on e-books.
On Tuesday, e-book retailers began issuing Apple-funded credits
to customer accounts. This follows Apple's agreement to pay $400
million in a settlement that ended an antitrust complaint that
accused the company and five of the largest U.S. book publishers of
working together to drive up e-book prices.
If you bought e-books from Apple, Amazon.com Inc., Barnes &
Noble Inc. and Kobo Inc. between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012,
this settlement could affect you, so check your emails for notes
from those vendors.
The credit will automatically hit your account if you're
eligible. How much you'll get back depends on how many e-books you
bought, as well as which ones. Customers will receive $6.93 for
every New York Times bestseller and $1.57 for all other books,
according to a statement from Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, a
law firm that litigated the case with the U.S. Department of
Justice and 33 state attorneys general.
Hundreds of consumers took to Twitter to announce they had
received their settlement credits, some getting more than $100
dollars Many said they would spend their credits on more e-books.
The credits will expire by June 24, 2017, Amazon said in a customer
FAQ published today.
The publishers, who previously settled for a $170 million sum
with the Justice Department and various states, include Lagardere
SCA's Hachette Book Group, CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster Inc.,
Penguin Group USA, Macmillan Publishers and News Corp's
HarperCollins Publishers. (News Corp also owns The Wall Street
Journal.)
Apple continued to appeal a lawsuit it lost in 2013 until the
Supreme Court declined to hear the company's challenges last year,
meaning the company must comply with a settlement it reached in
2014 a settlement it reached in 2014.
Neither Apple, Amazon or Kobo responded to multiple requests for
comment on the settlement funds reaching consumers. A Barnes &
Noble spokeswoman declined to comment.
Write to Nathan Olivarez-Giles at
Nathan.Olivarez-giles@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 21, 2016 17:01 ET (21:01 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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