Apple faces lawsuit in Canada for alleged monopoly in e-book market – Part 1

Apple is now facing a lawsuit in Canada on accusation of lobbying and monopolising the e-book prices at its online book shop, iBookStore. A local lawyer in Canada has filed the suit against the technology company on behalf of any Canadian citizen who has purchased an e-book over the last two years, backing the case on U.S. Department of Justice’s recent lawsuit, claiming Apple and its publishing partners colluded to fix the prices of e-books and drive down competition.

The lawsuit was officially file in Quebec Superior Court by Montreal lawyer Norman Painchaud, stating that Apple is fixing higher prices of the e-books on its portal in collaboration with the book publishers. The prices are way too higher than $9.99 average and mostly commonly found on Amazon.com.

However, various experts have asserted that the prices of books are not higher but at a normal level now. The average $9.99 price found on Amazon.com was a special offer from the company to sell more and more of its e-readers, Kindle and its variants.

I have actually broken the scheme down into parts in another article this week, how Amazon manages $9.99 in wholesale model and how Apple and the publishers incur even more losses in the agency model’s suggested $12.99 price tag normally found on iBookStore.

There are currently three similar suits in Canada, all seeking damages for any Canadians who have purchased an e-book. Painchaud, has maintained the stance against Apple, that if customers have purchased books on higher prices, they should get paid in return if Apple is proven guilty in this case.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Apr 21 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.