The Passive Voice

From Publishers Weekly:

When Grand Central Publishing gave the green light for a 25th-anniversary edition of Simple Abundance, I thought it would be a very straightforward and quick project. This clearly proved to be delusional, because the creative frenzy that followed was the hardest year of writing I’ve ever known. Its saving grace was that updating my book for the 21st century was also the happiest writing assignment I’ve ever had. In fact, the challenges I faced always faded at the end of the day, and each new morning meant a welcome chance to get it right.

Simple Abundance hasn’t been out of print since its publication in 1995, for which I’m eternally grateful. But the impetus to update came several years ago, when I started hearing from millennial and Generation X women who’d discovered for themselves the “pink book” their mothers had loved over the years. Something on its pages spoke to these young women too, creating a comforting continuity and respite from their relentless daily rounds.

But there was a problem: both they and I felt that more of my references should come from modern voices, and that some of the recommendations for seasonal activities dated both the book and its writer. No longer would readers send for a mail order catalogue or watch a VHS movie—it was online shopping and streaming video now!

Could I revise it for both its long-time readers and for younger women? While hearing from new readers who’d been children 25 years ago was delightful, it was humbling and eye-opening, too. It became clear that besides the obvious updates, today’s women—no matter their age—need a new kind of comfort.

Today’s rapidly changing, complex, and mostly alarming 24/7 breaking-news culture shocks us at every turn, regularly catapulting us into the realm of the unspeakable. From dawn to dark, we find ourselves embedded with reporters around the world covering every harrowing natural disaster or appalling terrorist atrocity.

Lassoed by our heartstrings, we helplessly watch strangers in danger, as these tragic events unfold in real time. Because we rarely can help, we become stunned by sorrow. What ought to be the task of shepherding our loved ones through ordinary days instead drains our energy, depletes our sense of security, and diminishes our capacity for happiness.

. . . .

Someone has to say it, so I’ll go first: this is not normal.

We are living through extraordinary times, and there is nothing normal about what is unfolding every day. And the only way to safeguard ourselves and those we love is by acknowledging that technology, while informative, must have its limits.

So how do we do this? The way women always have protected their own: by creating emotional, psychological, and physical safe havens that shelter what we hold sacred. In real time.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The IPKat:

On Monday, 2 December 2019, the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court issued a ruling in a case which explores the fine line between destruction and alteration of existing artwork. The conclusion? Cutting up an existing artwork to repurpose the individual pieces as wristwatch faces constitutes reproduction of the work in an amended form – not destruction followed by the creation of a new, original work.

. . . .

In the case in question, the Danish artist Tal Rosenzweig (better known as “Tal R”) had requested a preliminary injunction against the Danish company, Kanske Denmark ApS (“Kanske”), to prevent it from cutting up the painting “Paris Chic”, created by Tal R, in order to insert the pieces into wristwatches. In addition, Tal R had also separately requested preliminary injunctions against the manufacture, sale and marketing by Kanske of such wristwatches.

In the injunction requests, Tal R claimed primarily that the intended use of his “Paris Chic” painting by the company would constitute an infringement of his copyright to the work, reasoning that it would violate his exclusive rights under section 2(1) of the Danish Copyright Act “to control the work by reproducing it and by making it available to the public, whether in the original or in an amended form […]” as well as his rights under section 3(2) of the Act, according to which “[t]he work must not be altered nor made available to the public in a manner or in a context which is prejudicial to the author’s literary or artistic reputation or individuality”.

Tal R further claimed that by marketing and offering for sale the wristwatches (even though none had actually been made, and the painting was therefore yet unharmed), Kanske had violated section 3(1) of the Danish Marketing Practices Act, according to which “[t]raders shall exercise good marketing practice with reference to consumers, other traders and public interests”, as well as section 22(1) of the Act, which states that “[t]raders must not use business identifiers and similar devices that do not belong to them […]”. Specifically, Tal R claimed that Kanske had made unauthorized use of the “Tal R” brand in its marketing, thereby implying that a commercial partnership existed between Tal R and the company.

. . . .

After acquiring the painting, Kanske had initially announced on its website that it would host an online auction, promising that the winner would be given first choice of which piece of the painting he or she desired for a wristwatch. According to one screen shot submitted by Tal R, the highest bid as of 11 November 2019 was DKK 41,000 (approximately EUR 5,467).

. . . .

According to screen shots submitted by Tal R, the company went on to claim, inter alia, that the purpose of the project was to “arouse emotions”, and that “there can also be strength in the grief that people will feel at losing something. There can be a catharsis in people getting angry at us for doing something that people think is forbidden.”

Link to the rest at The IPKat

From Mike Shatzkin:

About 25 years ago, Ingram was benefiting from a big buildout of America’s bookstore network. Borders and Barnes & Noble were both opening new stores — big stores — at a rapid rate. Ingram hit a mother lode delivering “store opening assortments” and then, at least in some cases, doing the stock replenishment for the first 90 days.

The stock for the store opening cost the retailer more that way because Ingram couldn’t offer the discounts that publishers would give the stores for direct orders. But getting the opening stock delivered by store section, ready for shelving, and then covering the entire breadth of inventory for reorders across publishers that would also arrive consolidated rather than piecemeal, was worth a couple of points of margin.

Around this same time — 25 years ago — Jeff Bezos was using Ingram’s superior service to build Amazon.com in an industrial building in Seattle, in the same-day service zone for Ingram’s Roseburg, Oregon, warehouse.

Consolidation was the order of the day. Borders and Barnes & Noble were building out store networks that clearly threatened smaller chains and independents. (They would all also be hurt by Amazon, but that would take a few years to become obvious.) Publishers were also consolidating. (Random House and Bantam Doubleday Dell were the big merger of the late 1990s.) All of this threatened Ingram’s basic business model, which was built on being an efficiency-creator between many publishers selling to many bookstore customers.

But the efficiency of centralized supply was also clearly demonstrated to the chains, so B&N saw value in acquiring Ingram to own their own supply chain, presumably opening up the possibility of buying from publishers at the higher discounts normally afforded to wholesalers. It took two years for the deal to fall through because of federal government concern about “monopoly”. That meant Ingram had to start rethinking the future of their company.

And it meant Barnes & Noble would build its own warehouse network to provide more efficient resupply to its own stores that would give them a competitive advantage over Borders, their primary competitor. Borders, of course, was thinking along similar lines.

. . . .

And now things have changed again. B&N’s viability is threatened by the movement of book sales from physical retail to online retail. New ownership is now challenged to find new paths to commercial viability. The biggest opportunity may be a return to the past, once again turning over the supply chain to Ingram.

As sales of books in the retail channel decline, as they have and will continue to, the per-unit cost of maintaining a proprietary supply infrastructure just keeps rising.

. . . .

On top of that, the “job” of the resupply infrastructure for a retail chain has become much more challenging. When B&N was building out its capabilities at the turn of this century, the number of possible titles was probably not even a million and many of their stores carried over 100,000. Now there well over 10 million titles available through Ingram’s print-on-demand database plus nearly a million more in warehouse stock (which includes most of what is new and sells the fastest), and the retail stores carry a third or less than they did back then. The more that ratio shifts, as what each store carries is a smaller and smaller fraction of the possible universe, the more expensive it is to maintain your own supply chain.

. . . .

James Daunt, the new head of B&N, had no such option when he was rebuilding Waterstones, the UK chain he previously managed. There is no wholesaling operation in the UK with comparable ability to supply the breadth of titles Ingram does. But one imagines that Daunt sees every day what it is costing him to keep operating his distribution centers. One also imagines he also feels a need to free up capital on a daily basis.

Link to the rest at Mike Shatzkin

PG suggests that Mike’s post highlights just one of Barnes & Noble’s many problems.

The continued growth of Amazon and other online retailers (Walmart has been spending a lot of money on its online operations for several years and may have finally figured it out) is a huge indication that US consumers are perfectly happy with buying a lot of things online.

Large and small grocery chains have started services that allow online shopping with the bags of bananas, Doritos and Coke delivered to their car trunk or home. If there was ever a commodity that a great many observers thought would never go online, it was produce sales where shoppers have traditionally eyed and squeezed the fresh fruits and veggies before they selected the perfect cucumber.

Of course, each copy of a book is the same (down to the electron level for ebooks) and online information and opinions about various books on offer is enormous. Plus text messages and email make it effortless for Bev to share her book raves and rants to her friends who like to read the same sort of things she does.

PG contends that fewer and fewer feel they will understand any more about whether a book is right for them by leafing through a hardcover at a physical bookstore. They can look inside on Amazon, find out all far more about whether they’re likely to enjoy it online than they’ll ever get from an underpaid Barnes & Noble clerk (if they can find one when they need one).

Again, there is so much more detailed and reliable information about a new book online than in the bookstore, what does anyone really learn from picking it up and looking at the back cover?

In past decades, PG would sometimes visit a bookstore to kill some time in a pleasant manner. The electronic devices in his pocket or on his desk provide a much better time-killing service than any bookstore he has ever visited.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

~  W. Somerset Maugham

From The HuffPost:

Greta Gerwig kept pausing, sometimes midsentence. It was a Monday night in early November, and her newest movie, “Little Women,” echoed through the halls of the Manhattan theater where awards voters were among the first to see it. She shot it on film, and a projectionist needed to switch reels at the exact right moment so the action didn’t skip a beat. Gerwig was nervous. “It’s very easy to f*** up,” she said. She stopped periodically to listen, the sounds of the famous March sisters flooding our greenroom.

Nothing went awry, at least not during the 45 minutes I spent with Gerwig, who was beginning the monthslong promotional blitz required of a Christmas Day release that’s based on a beloved book and headed for Oscar contention. But you’d forgive those interruptions, too. “Little Women” isn’t Gerwig’s first solo directorial achievement — that’s the 2017 coming-of-age hit “Lady Bird” — yet it is the movie she was destined to make, as corny as that sounds. Of course she was nervous.

. . . .

Like “A Star Is Born” last year, “Little Women” is a testament to once-a-generation adaptations. The previous big-screen rendition, featuring Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst, opened 25 years ago, allowing enough distance to justify another interpretation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic text. (Before that, Hollywood had adapted “Women” five times, including versions starring Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor.) In the same way that Lady Gaga’s “Star Is Born” performance implicated those of Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland, Gerwig’s “Little Women” offers a meta approach to Alcott’s words and the reactions they’ve elicited over the past 150 years.

During their second week of production last October, Gerwig and her cast went to see “A Star Is Born” near Concord, Massachusetts, which is where they shot the film and where much of it takes place. “We sobbed our faces off,” she said. “If you’re starting with great source material and the heart of something eternal — I mean, how many productions of ‘Hamlet’ have there been? We revisit these because they say something to us. I think what was astonishing to me when I read ‘Little Women’ as an adult was how … ”

. . . .

Gerwig’s “Little Women” is a dissertation on the passage of time, the evolution of femininity and the weight of shared stories.

. . . .

“It wasn’t that I was looking for the bigger thing and then this was the bigger thing,” she said. “It’s that this is what I wanted to do, and it needed more bells and whistles. It needed the whole confetti factory. One thing that I loved about ‘Little Women’ was that there were so many different things about it that were new to tackle for me, [like] the world-building of the time period and creating something consistent but interesting but modern but genuine but period-correct but not slavishly devoted.”

Saying her “Little Women” isn’t slavishly devoted might be an understatement. Gerwig knew immediately that she would restructure Alcott’s linear tale, beginning when the four March sisters are adults and using flashbacks to navigate the defining recollections of their youth. Her approach is both reverent and fresh, wistful and progressive. Events unspool as the protagonists look back at a bygone time when they resided under one roof, poor but spirited.

. . . .

As a girl, Gerwig skipped the novel’s second half, finding the depiction of marriage and maturation unrelatable. Now, it’s what most interests her. For that reason, she wanted to make a “Little Women” for adults. Memories — “the way you’re always looking back to go forward,” as she described it — are a fulcrum that guides the characters’ sense of themselves. No single moment better distills that essence than a line delivered by a grown-up March: “I can’t believe childhood is over.”

. . . .

In independent-minded writer Jo, the second-eldest March sibling, she found a kindred soul. The movie begins with adult Jo (Saoirse Ronan, who also headlined “Lady Bird”) preparing to enter a New York publisher’s office to sell a story she’s composed. At first, we see only Jo’s back — “like a boxer,” head lowered, shoulders wide. Moments later, she’s running through town in a mad dash that resembles a popular “Frances Ha” scene wherein Gerwig’s title character sprints down a Chinatown street. (“I’m interested in women in motion,” Gerwig said. “Of course I am.”) Another two hours pass, and after gracefully hopscotching across timelines, the film concludes with a shot of Jo’s face in that same office. No matter the financial and emotional trials that intervened, she has won the match.

“I wanted it to be a palindrome,” Gerwig explained. “I wanted it to read backwards and forwards, so the movie starts on her back and ends on her face so that you could start the movie again from the beginning. It’s a circle.”

That quote alone defines the Gerwig who has blossomed over the course of the 2010s: literary, analytical, witty.

Link to the rest at The HuffPost

PG hesitates to draw conclusions from anything he sees in The HuffPost, but this sounds like a disaster for any who loved the book. For their sakes, he hopes he is wrong.

From Publishing Perspectives:

In a game of “getting warmer,” the publishing industry has been slow to recognize that in order to widen its consumer base, it needs to represent consumers in its own ranks. As a demographic, black women are one of the fastest-growing consumer groups for books, but according to the 2015 Lee & Low study “Diversity in Publishing,” only 4% of publishing employees are black. If you look specifically at acquiring editors, you’ll find that number is likely even smaller.

With nearly 80% of the industry identifying as white, straight, and able bodied, is it any wonder that so many stories sound the same? Calls for more diverse characters, authors, and stories are great. There’s a step further that must be taken, however; we need to make changes to the gatekeepers. As Kacen Callender rightly pointed out in their Publishers Weekly article, “We Need Diverse Editors,” sometimes stories weren’t written for the people we have guarding the house.

The need for representation in all aspects of publishing is clear. In order to get an editor, books need to be represented by agents—so it stands to reason that the industry needs diverse agents, as well. Publishing already has some amazing agents of color who you can learn more about via litagentsofcolor.com. But few agencies have more than a handful of agents that stray outside the industry’s typical demographic. Though many publishing houses and agencies claim to implement “diversity initiatives,” they often fail to address the true barriers to entry that exist—and they don’t take actionable measures to ensure that the people they do hire have opportunities to advance.

As a standard practice in the agenting world, agents and assistants work very closely together, both figuratively and literally. In hiring for a position that requires a great deal of subjectivity, agents often look for people with whom they share a connection; they want those who will view books the same way they do. Unfortunately, that is often focused through a white, heterosexual, able-bodied lens.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

While recognizing that there are good and bad agents, PG doubts there is much of a future for diverse or non-diverse agents coming into the business these days.

He has no problem with the artistic and business advice services good literary agents provide nor with the access to editors at traditional publishers they also offer.

In PG’s experience, author/agent problems arise from the following elements of the business relationship:

1. Agency contracts and royalties extend forever (life of the author plus 70 years in the US) because they piggyback on the publishing agreement the agent acquires for the author and typical publishing agreements from traditional publishers extend for the life of the author’s copyright. The agency agreements are almost never tied to the services of a particular agent, someone the author knows and trusts, the reason the author signed with the agency. When that agent dies or retires, someone new will inherit all the rights and powers the author granted to the original agent s/he relied upon and trusted.
2. Agencies usually receive the royalty statement and the entire royalty check traditional publishers send out twice per year. Some agencies never provide copies of the publisher’s royalty statement to their authors. Some agencies never tell the author the exact amount of the royalty check(s) received. Some agencies don’t immediately tell the author when the royalty statement/check arrive. Unfortunately, some agencies keep part or all of the royalties the author should be receiving.
3. Anybody can become a literary agent. There are no state or federal licensing requirements with accompanying rules/standards with which an agent must comply. Someone can walk out of prison (or a drug rehab facility) one day and open a literary agency the next day. A literary agent can be indicted for fraud and continue to accept new clients and receive royalty checks for large amounts of money. PG is not aware of any government entity that is tasked with regulating or auditing literary agents.

Again, PG has no complaint against the knowledgeable, honest and hardworking agents that are scrupulously careful with their clients’ money and artistic future. He merely points out that, based upon his long observation of human behavior, where there is an opportunity for a person to abuse a relationship of trust, a small percentage of people will eventually abuse that relationship to the detriment of the person who trusts them.

Lawyers can be disbarred (and a few richly deserve that treatment). Accountants can have their professional certifications and licenses terminated. Medical licenses can be revoked. Some states require that manicurists and pedicurists (“Nail Technicians”) be licensed and those licenses can be terminated.

Literary agents? Nada.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Politicians and social critics who worry about “the curse of bigness”—and vow to rewrite antitrust law to break up Facebook and Google—forget what happened the last time the government used the law against a Silicon Valley company. In 2012 the government successfully sued Apple for daring to compete with Amazon in selling e-books. The unintended result was not exactly a victory for the consumer or for competition: the continued dominance of Kindle, Amazon’s e-book format and reading device; increased e-book prices; and suppressed e-book innovation.

Chris Sagers, a law professor at Cleveland State University, explains in “United States v. Apple: Competition in America” what he sees as confusion about antitrust law. His analysis can be helpful—he notes the long history of companies invoking claims of “predatory pricing” as a cudgel against more efficient competitors and stresses that consumers often benefit when industries and companies are driven out of business—but he is confused about the case itself.

His thesis is that Apple’s entry into the e-book market was so clearly a violation of antitrust law that critics of the case must not believe in competition. But critics object to an interpretation of antitrust law that ended up punishing Apple for introducing a new pricing approach—an approach that is now common in every other area of online sales. Mr. Sagers forgets the guardrail rule of antitrust: Don’t bring cases against innovations that create more competition.

Consumers were delighted when Amazon launched its Kindle e-reader in 2007, and book publishers were happy to sell books in digital form. But there was an unusual feature. In its selling of e-books, Amazon operated according to the same pricing arrangement that had governed the sale of print books—that is, it bought e-books wholesale and chose its own price for them, just as bookstores had long done with print books. Brick-and-mortar bookstores needed this pricing flexibility for many reasons, not least to clear their inventory of unsold books by means of lower prices. The arrangement let Amazon sell e-books for years as a loss-leader—at the low price of $9.99—to boost profitable sales of its Kindle devices.

Around the same time, Apple had set about licensing music, video and games so that consumers would have reasons to buy its iPad. Apple realized that, for digital goods, there was no reason to follow the wholesale model. It could simply set up a revenue-sharing formula. Content owners and app developers—think of an iPad or iPhone game, such as “Minecraft” or “Fortnite,” that offers premium features—could pick their own price, even choosing to offer content free, and Apple would take 30% of any sales as a commission.

When Steve Jobs decided to include e-books on the iPad in 2010, Kindle had a 90% market share. So book publishers were again delighted—that Apple would be entering the market with its revenue-share model and letting publishers set the prices for their e-books. The largest publishers met among themselves to agree on the terms for licensing their books to Apple. The government sued, claiming an unlawful conspiracy masterminded by Apple.

Mr. Sagers sees this as an open-and-shut case of an unlawful pricing conspiracy and expresses surprise that there was so much support for the book publishers and Apple. He rightly dismisses the self-serving argument that books are so culturally important that publishers and Apple deserved an antitrust exemption. He is also right to note that Amazon was not, despite its huge market share, an unlawful monopolist—big is not always bad.

. . . .

Mr. Sagers believes that opposition to the Apple case shows that Americans are ambivalent about competition. There are times, he says, when “competition seems destructive.” When antitrust law requires firms to compete in such circumstances, then “antitrust itself has seemed like a failure.” The government claimed that Apple conspired with book publishers, risking higher prices, but the case was perceived as a government favor to Amazon, which it was.

Indeed, people objected to the Apple case because it was ill-advised—limiting consumer choices and blocking lower prices. Appeals Court Judge Dennis Jacobs made this point, writing in his 2015 dissent that Apple’s conduct “immediately deconcentrated the e-book retail market, added a platform for reading e-books, and removed barriers to entry by others.” With Apple in the game, Amazon’s 90% market share fell to 60%. Now it’s back up to 83%, according to the latest industry estimate. As competition decreased, prices increased. The typical price for a Kindle best seller is now in the range of $14.95.

. . . .

The Apple case violated the first rule of antitrust: First, do no harm.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

PG hasn’t read the book that is the subject of the WSJ review. However, the author of the review wildly misstates the purposes, activities and actions of Apple and all but one of the largest publishers in the United States.

Let us review the actions and actors in this matter (which were extensively documented and discussed on TPV during the days of yore):

1. While Amazon was not the first entity to sell ebooks, it was the first to sell ebooks from traditional publishers at a substantial discount from their list prices, which correlated with the suggested list prices for printed versions of the same books.
2. Amazon also was revolutionary in permitting self-published books (including ebooks) to be listed and sold side-by-side on the same basis as traditionally-published books.
3. The six largest publishers in the United States – Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster had developed a cozy little dinner group consisting of their CEO’s who met about every three months in a private dining room in Manhattan to talk about their mutual concerns – most often Amazon’s habit of discounting the prices of their books and what they could do about it. These six produced the majority of books sold in the US and were receiving complaints from their traditional bookstore customers about Amazon’s low prices. The publishers did not want to “cannibalize” their sales of printed books and were the recipients of a growing number of complaints from their traditional bookstore customers. No company attorneys were present during these dinner discussions.
4. PG will note that private meetings of the top executives of large companies that dominate an industry to discuss the pricing of their products are almost always a bad idea and, by themselves, raise a big red antitrust flag. Competent corporate counsel would always advise against such a practice.
5. Apple was planning to introduce its iPad in January, 2010, and include an iBookstore as one of the product’s attractions.
6. PG notes that Apple has never been a fan of significant discounts for the products it sells.
7. In December, 2009, Apple’s senior VP of Internet Software and Services, Eddy Cue, contacted the members of the Publishers dinner group to set up meetings.
8. During these meetings, Cue said that Apple:
   1. Would sell the majority of e-books between $9.99 and $14.99, with new releases being $12.99 to $14.99, higher prices than Amazon was charging.
   2. Apple would use the same “agency pricing model” that it used in the App Store for ebooks.
   3. Agency Pricing allowed the Publishers control the retail price of the e-books with Apple receiving a 30% commission.
   4. Most significantly, Apple would require what is generically described as a “Most-favored nation” clause in its contracts with publishers that allowed Apple to sell e-book at the lowest price of its ebookstore competitors (read “Amazon”).
9. PG doesn’t recall if the publishers had another private CEO dinner or not, but evidence at the later antitrust trial showed the Big Six publishers called each other over 100 times in the week before signing the Apple agreements. Everyone except Random House boarded this bandwagon.
10. In January 2010, Apple held one of its typically flashy product launches for the iPad together with its associated ebook, music and video stores.
11. During the post-launch mingling, Wall Street Journal reporter Walter Mossberg asked Steve Jobs why people would pay $14.99 for a book in the iBookstore when they could purchase it for $9.99 from Amazon. In response Jobs stated that “The price will be the same… Publishers are actually withholding their books from Amazon because they are not happy.” In other words, the publishers would force Amazon to raise its ebook prices to match those in the iBookstore.
12. Amazon complained to the Federal Trade Commission and, rather than not being able to sell any ebooks of the major publishers, switched to the agency model after negotiations with the major publishers. This resulted in an average per unit e-book retail price increase of 14.2% for their new releases, 42.7% for their NYT Bestsellers, and 18.6% across all of the Publisher Defendants’ e-books.

For lots more information, see United States v. Apple on Wikipedia.

Back to the book reviewed in the OP, there was nothing wrong with Apple “introducing a new pricing structure” – agency pricing. Had Apple only done that, no antitrust violation would have occurred. However, when Apple conspired with a group of the largest publishers to force Amazon (and anyone else selling ebooks) to adopt agency pricing when such had not previously been the case, that was an antitrust violation, particularly in the light of what happened to ebook prices after the coordinated joint action took place.

Had the big publishers individually been willing to lose the highly-profitable ebook sales on Amazon as a potential consequence of telling Amazon it had to raise its prices and/or agree to let the publisher set the price, that would probably not have triggered any antitrust concern. Coordination between the publishers to use their combined power to force Amazon raise prices was where the publishers crossed a clear legal line.

With respect to what happened in the court case, each of the publishers admitted guilt, settled the antitrust claim and promised not to do any price-fixing in the future. Apple litigated the antitrust case to the max and lost at every stage.

Although Amazon was not a party to the litigation, Amazon won.

More significantly (in PG’s majestic and resplendent opinion), authors won. Indie authors in particular won. In June, 2010, a couple of years before any antitrust litigation had been commenced, Amazon introduced its 70% ebook royalty option which has put a great deal of additional money into authors’ pockets ever since.

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow