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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged publishing

1. April 13, 2012 08:05 PM

   Audit Notes: Ebooks, Amazon, and Apple Edition

   By Ryan Chittum

   Barry C. Lynn, author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, writes a good Slate piece on the Justice Department's misguided suit against Apple and book publishers for fighting Amazon's ebooks monopoly. Lynn writes about why low prices aren't always good for consumers: For 200 years after the Boston Tea Party, anti-monopoly enforcement aimed mainly at...

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2. April 11, 2012 07:56 PM

   Ebooks and Antitrust

   The Justice Department sues Apple and five book publishers for fighting Amazon

   By Ryan Chittum

   Back in 2010, a giant retailer had 90 percent of a market—a near total monopoly (monopsony, if you want to be precise). This company tried to dictate pricing in the industry via its dominant position (aided significantly, to be sure, by its early innovation in the market) and by the fact that it can use its profits elsewhere to subsidize...

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3. February 8, 2012 03:14 PM

   Remembering the Golden Age of Book Publishing

   A review of Richard Seaver’s The Tender Hour of Twilight

   By Phil Campbell

   The Tender Hour of Twilight | By Richard Seaver | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | 480 pages, $35.00 An engaging memoir about the history of the publishing industry sounds about as plausible as a successful magazine about plumbing; people normally just want to read the books that get published, not the vulgar details of how these books made their way...

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4. April 25, 2012 07:55 PM

   The Journal Misses on Ebooks and Antitrust

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's usually wise to read an "experts say" story a little more skeptically than you normally would. That's the case with a Wall Street Journal story earlier this week on the Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against five major book publishers and Apple, who were trying to break Amazon's 90 percent monopoly on the ebook retail market. The headline says...

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5. March 8, 2012 07:10 PM

   The Justice Department and the Price of Books

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department is going after Apple and book publishers for colluding to fix prices in the e-book market, a big development in that fast-growing industry. Back when Apple launched its iBooks store, Steve Jobs got publishers to switch how they sold e-books to retailers. Publishers had been selling them for half the list...

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6. May 16, 2012 11:00 AM

   What’s the right price for ebooks? (updated)

   It's probably not 99 cents

   By Ryan Chittum

   Author Chuck Windig, GigaOm's Mathew Ingram, and TechDirt's Mike Masnick all took on the question of ebook pricing recently, arguing that production costs (you know, minor details like advances, editors, etc.) don't or shouldn't factor into the end price. Ingram writes that "It doesn't matter what e-books cost to make," and Masnick follows with "Nobody Cares About the Fixed Costs...

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