I received an email this morning from Amazon notifying me that my eBook settlement credit had been applied to my account. Checking KBoards, there are starting to be lots of happy people with significant credit to spend.
For those of you who haven’t been following this story (are there any of you?), the settlement amounts are the result of the Agency Pricing case against the Big Publishers, all of whom settled. Apple, of course, is still in the process of fighting it, and, if they lose, there may be more settlement amounts in the future.
According to the settlement website, Barnes & Noble is also in the process of disbursing credits, but I haven’t received an email from them, and, checking the Nook Boards, it doesn’t look like anyone’s talking about receiving theirs. Amounts were supposed to be disbursed today, so I suppose we should wait at least until the end of the day before becoming concerned. I wasn’t surprised Amazon distributed them first.
My amount from Amazon was quite small. During the time period the settlement covers, I was buying mostly from Barnes & Noble, so I’m hoping for a decent amount from them. I have some books on my Wish List I’d love to buy!
How about you? Are you seeing your credits, and are they amounts worth celebrating? Feel free to share in the Comments!
Mine was only $11.68. Not NEAR what I was expecting 🙁
Mine was $31.39 – ok, but nothing significant. I bought more books than a reasonable person could ever realistically read. Few were bestsellers or popular authors; fewer were self-published.
Settlements like these are often ridiculous, but this one was more so than most. The court seemed to have the idea that books that make NY Times bestseller list are somehow special and deserve two or three times the payout of others.
Given that there are companies that know how to game that bestseller list and many of us who never pay it any mind, that was a ridiculous assumption. Besides, a publisher who wants to see a book make that list is likely to underprice it rather than overprice it.
Where lawsuits are needed is with college textbooks. Long ago, one of my college textbooks, good for three quarters of physics, cost me the equivalent of about seven hours of work at the minimum wage. It’s current equivalent requires some 20 hours of work at today’s minimum wage. That’s where the ripoffs are.
$47.70 – a good amount, I would say. I jumped into Kindle some time in 2009 without knowledge of Agency Pricing and bought way too many pricy best sellers from the Big 6 before I caught on. I know I will be seeing some smaller amount from Barnes & Noble (today?). I thank all those Kindle bloggers for cluing me in to the reality of this monkey business early on, and for pointing the way to many free and very inexpensive e-book sources and sites.
@Karen, B&N finally got around to putting up a notice on their site. They’ll be disbursing credits over the next 3 days. Typical that they can’t react as quickly as Amazon. Sigh.
Well, I’m appreciating the $92. I was an early adopter of the Kindle and was by turns, frustrated and infuriated with the whole ‘agency pricing’ fiasco.
It affected many more books than just the NYT bestseller list–I know, because as far as I know, I’ve never purchased one. This whole mess was based on the fact that publishers freaked out because Amazon’s vision of ebooks wasn’t a fluke. Since then, they’ve done everything they could to kill ebooks with one hand, while greedily money grabbing with the other.
Once again all ebook stores are giving Amazon free publicity.
A lot of people probably think that this is something special only Amazon is doing for their customers.
With such competition is it easy for Amazon to win.
@ Michael Perry, the reason that more money was given for best sellers is probably due to the fact that Amazon advertised (at the time) that NYT bestsellers were $9.99 or less. For some books, that was a pretty steep discount.
Hmm… guess I bought the wrong books at the wrong time from the wrong ebook seller. I got a measly $3.65 in iTunes credit as part of this settlement (The notification specifically said it WASN’T from Apple.)
I received my credit from B&N today, and I can use it to buy ebooks or print books. I haven’t received a credit from Amazon yet. I think I’m eligible for an Amazon credit, but I’m not sure.
I got nothing from Amazon, which I am a little surprised about, but an email from B&N said I should be receiving something in a couple of days.
I got an email from B&N with an indication I’d be receiving something, and instructions on how to check how much I’d be getting. I checked, and it turned out I’d only bought three eligible titles during that time, none of them a NYT bestseller, so my total turned out to be $2.19.
That was the time I was doing most of my buying from B&N. I also received my email from them, and I’m going to be getting $31.41. I’d bought 3 NYT bestsellers and 30 other books. I was hoping to get enough to purchase Brandon Sanderson’s new book. I’ll got enough to buy it and several more. I’m pretty happy.