{"id":5786,"date":"2021-01-18T16:33:18","date_gmt":"2021-01-18T16:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrgate.com\/eng\/?p=5786"},"modified":"2021-04-01T11:48:57","modified_gmt":"2021-04-01T11:48:57","slug":"amazon-e-books-overpricing-and-monopolizing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/?p=5786","title":{"rendered":"Amazon E-books, Overpricing and Monopolizing!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Kiev. Ukraine. Ukraine Gate &#8211; January 18, 2021 \u2013 Technology<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">American law firm Hagens Berman has filed a class action lawsuit against online retailer Amazon.com Inc., accusing the company of overpricing e-books.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Hagens Berman claims that Amazon, which controls 90% of the US e-book market, colluded with five major publishers &#8211; Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin-Random House and Simon &amp; Schuster &#8211; in 2015 to inflate prices.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As a result of the collusion, publishers raised the prices of their e-books by 30%, which allowed Amazon to avoid competition from other retailers, Hagens Berman said.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#8220;In a competitive market, the Big Five (publishers &#8211; ed.) Would sell e-books on their sites or through Amazon&#8217;s competitors who charge lower commissions at a lower cost,&#8221; the statement said.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In 2011, Hagens Berman filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc. and five publishers, making similar charges against them. Apple then paid $ 400 million to settle the claims.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">As the WSJ notes, Amazon released the Kindle e-reader in 2007, offering bestsellers at discounted prices, allowing the company to gain market share.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">There are several antitrust investigations currently underway against Amazon. In October, the US House of Representatives antitrust subcommittee completed its 16-month investigation into several technology companies, concluding that Amazon has a monopoly on third-party sellers on its platform.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In 2019, the US Department of Justice launched an investigation into the dominance of large tech companies, including Amazon. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also reviews industry practices.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kiev. Ukraine. Ukraine Gate &#8211; January 18, 2021 \u2013 Technology American law firm Hagens Berman has filed a class action lawsuit against online retailer Amazon.com Inc., accusing the company of overpricing e-books. Hagens Berman claims that Amazon, which controls 90% of the US e-book market, colluded with five major publishers &#8211; Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin-Random [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[79,1724,2780,2781,2779],"class_list":["post-5786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ukraine-news","tag-amazon","tag-company","tag-e-books","tag-monopolizing","tag-overpricing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ukrgate.com\/eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}