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An antitrust suit accusing Apple and a number of book publishers ofprice fixing and collusion was filed by the U.S. Department ofJustice on Wednesday [updated]. The complaint was filed in a New York district court against Apple,Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Penguin, according to Bloomberg . Indications first surfaced on Tuesday that the Department of Justice was readying an antitrust suit. The justice department is expected to settle with "severalpublishers" this week, as Reuters reported earlier that Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin,Macmillan and HarperCollins are involved in negotiations. Apple andMacmillan have reportedly refused to engage in settlement talks,and have argued that Apple's pricing agreements have enhancedcompetition in an industry that was previously dominated by Amazon. Update: Court filings have revealed that Simon & Schuster, Hachette andHarperCollins did, in fact, settle their cases. Word of the government's interest in e-book price fixing first cameto light in March , when it was revealed that the Department of Justice had warnedApple and five major publishers of its plans to sue them. Thegovernment has taken issue with Apple's alleged role in convincinge-book publishers to switch to an "agency model" for sales, ratherthan the "wholesale model" that Amazon had implemented with its ownKindle store. Under Amazon's method, publishers would sell their books atwholesale and let the bookseller set its own prices. Amazonrepeatedly upset publishers by selling titles at a loss. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said himself to biographer Walter Isaacson that publishers "hated" Amazon'smethod, and the online retailer had "screwed it up." Because ofthat, Jobs said, publishers were willing to switch to the agencymodel and partner with Apple. "We told the publishers, 'We'll go to the agency model, where youset the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays alittle more, but that's what you want anyway,'" Jobs said. "But wealso asked for a guarantee that if anybody else is selling thebooks cheaper than we are, then we can sell them at the lower pricetoo. So they went to Amazon and said, 'You're going to sign anagency contract or we're not going to give you the books.'". I am an expert from ipl-beautymachines.com, while we provides the quality product, such as IPL RF Beauty Equipment , IPL Skin Rejuvenation Machine, IPL Tattoo Removal Machine,and more.
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