According to a court filing released on Tuesday, CEOs of the same publishing houses that once rejected the price-fixing theory will now offer evidence to suggest they colluded with Apple in order to increase ebook prices. The case involves allegations that Apple and its late CEO Steve Jobs organized a conspiracy with the Big Six publishers to introduce a commission-style pricing system in order to wrest pricing power from Amazon.

The new filing, posted below, says that the CEOs of Macmillan, Hachette, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Random House will testify about various aspects of Apple’s role in the alleged conspiracy. All of these companies with the exception of Random House were also named in the antitrust lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice and agreed to settle the case last year.

The government’s new filing says Macmillan CEO John Sargent is expected to testify that:

“[T]he deal that 5 of us did with Apple meant someone was gonna have to do it. Just luck of the draw that it was me. . . . The optics make it look like I stood alone, but in the end I had no doubt that the others would eventually follow.”

Such evidence could prove damaging to Apple, which is also expected to confront testimony from Amazon executives. Apple will also be forced explain a growing list of possibly incriminating comments and emails. One of these, cited by the government to show Apple played an active role in the price changes, describes SVP of internet software and services Eddy Cue telling Jobs:

“In the end, they want us and see the opportunity we give them but they’re scared to commit! It [has] less to do with the terms and more about the dramatic business change for them. . . . They just have to get some balls.”

The new filing also includes the views of other prominent executives, including News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch. According to Harper Collins CEO Brian Murray, Murdoch was “pissed at Amazon” and wanted to “screw Amazon.”

In its own filings, Apple maintains its long-held position that it is not a “ringmaster” of a conspiracy, as the government alleges, but that it simply offered the same pricing system, which is based on a 30 percent commission, that it offers to any company that sells through its iTunes store. Apple also maintains that it helped to create competition at a time when Amazon dominated the ebook market.

The next important step of the proceedings will take place on May 23, when the parties meet before U.S. District Judge Denise Cote for a pre-trial conference.

Here’s the filing (all 156 pages of it!) with some of the key points underlined:

DOJ Motion of Facts and Law

Here are a few examples of ebooks and the discounts they are receiving at various retailers. Note that Kindle, Nook and the iBookstore are matching each other’s discounts, while in most cases Kobo and Google hadn’t begun discounting as of Thursday afternoon.

According to the terms of the settlement, Macmillan — like the other settling publishers — can’t restrict retailers like Amazon from setting, changing, or lowering ebook prices for two years. Though Macmillan only settled in February, its settlement gave it a back-dated head start on the two-year period, running from December 18, 2012 — the same date that Penguin agreed to settle.

Speaking of Penguin: Retailers still have not begun discounting its ebooks, Publishers Lunch notes, even though it settled nearly four months ago. Amazon still lists Penguin’s ebook prices as being set by the publisher.

Discounts on ebooks from Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins — who settled with the DOJ back in April 2012 — have been in effect for several months. In most cases, retailers haven’t offered steep discounts on any of the settling publishers’ titles, and to my knowledge, we haven’t yet seen any of the bundling promotions or ebook giveaways that are largely allowed by the settlement.

Macmillan’s $20 million payout is added to the $69 million that Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster agreed to pay consumers. The money will be doled out in the form of small credits at ebook retailers.

The fifth publisher involved in the ebook pricing lawsuits, Penguin, settled with the Department of Justice in December but hasn’t reached settlements in the class action suit or with the states. Apple continues to fight all three lawsuits, in a trial set to begin in June.

As my colleague Jeff Roberts wrote last August, the class-action lawyers don’t reap much from the deal: “The settlement lets publishers short-circuit the class action lawyers who are coming at them with a separate lawsuit. Those lawyers, who say they would get more money if they were in charge, are now frozen out because there is no money left to collect on behalf of consumers.” Publishers Lunch speculates that “the class action lawyers may be expecting to reap their bounty from any settlement with or judgment against Apple.”

I got a demo of Bookish at the company’s trendy, book-filled offices in Manhattan’s Flatiron District last week, and had a chance to use the site further on Monday when it was prematurely available online for several hours as it was being tested. Overall, I think the long-delayed Bookish is off to a promising start.

Bookish has the opportunity to shape book discovery and offers publishers a chance to directly engage with readers. It also allows them to tiptoe into direct sales. I’m less intrigued by the original editorial content: I’m not sure it differentiates itself enough from other book-related content on the web to draw users to the site for the first time. Once those users make their way to the site, though, they’ll find a clean, easy-to-use design, and an algorithm that may well find them their next book — even though it’s limited to less than a quarter of the books on the site for now. Here’s my overview of the site.

 The basics: Books and authors

While only three of the big-six publishers are financially backing the site, the other three — Random House, HarperCollins and Macmillan — are making their books available through it, along with 10 other publishers including Scholastic and Houghton Mifflin. In total, that’s 1.2 million unique titles spanning 18 genres (fiction and literature, children’s, cookbooks, and so on), and 400,000 authors have profile pages. The book pages include basic information, a preview of the first chapter, related news and videos, and a roundup of any “must-read” lists that the book has appeared on (for more on those lists, see below). Each book page also includes purchase links (more on that below, too).

Algorithm-generated book recommendations

Online book discovery is a huge problem for publishers, and Bookish tackles it with a recommendation algorithm that lets users input up to four titles to find what to read next. “We’re very much a technology company,” Karen Sun, an MIT grad (and book blogger) who is heading the company’s recommendation engine, told me. “This is probably the largest venture in the book space, in terms of data.” Sun explained that while Amazon and Goodreads primarily deliver book recommendations based on “collaborative filtering” — namely, a user’s purchasing or rating and reviewing history as well as those of other users — Bookish doesn’t have that user or purchase data yet. Instead, it relies on “deep, introspective” data: “Recommendations are based on the books and understanding of the books.” The recommendation looks at features like the authors, editors and illustrators who contributed to a book, the awards a book has won, and genre and publication date, then layers on a machine-learning component that parses user and professional reviews to try to distill themes, concepts and sentiments. Insights from the editorial team are included, too.

A user who liked The Help, for instance, receives recommendations for Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford — another women’s fiction title that features race relations — and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book that, like The Help, includes an aspiring female author. Type in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and the engine pulled up four similar “big ideas” books, but also two Spanish-language titles that were out of place even if the subject matter was similar (and you’ll see a Spanish-language edition of The Room in the recommendations for The Help above).

For now, Bookish’s recommendation engine works with only about 250,000 of the 1.2 million books on the site. Sun says the engine will improve over time, and will eventually integrate reader reviews and user actions — other books users have looked at and rated on the site.

E-commerce: Essential, but…

Each book on the site can be purchased in print or digital formats directly through Bookish or from another retailer — there are affiliate links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, Apple and Kobo.

Distributor Baker & Taylor is handling all of Bookish’s direct sales. For now, ebooks purchased through Bookish are only available in EPUB and PDF formats, for reading on iPad, Android, Nook and desktop — no Kindle.

Bookish seems to want to stress that it’s not cutting into other retailers’ sales, even though a serious direct-sales outlet is something that book publishers desperately need.

“We want to be able to say you can buy [a book] here and it’s reasonably priced. We’re not trying to steal sales away from other places,” CEO Khazaei told me. Publishers probably don’t care about taking sales from Amazon, but they may not want to sour relationships with retailers like Barnes & Noble and the independent bookstores represented by IndieBound.

Bookish’s print and ebook prices appeared to match those offered by Amazon, though I wasn’t able to test many titles. Khazaei told me that “I don’t know how the pricing decisions are made, really,” Khazaei said. “I assume [Baker & Taylor] is tracking [prices on other sites] but we just leave it in their hands.” While the site seems like an obvious place for publishers to run special sales on both print and digital books, that doesn’t seem to be a priority for now. Update: Khazaei stressed to me that his lack of involvement with pricing is required by the Department of Justice in order to be compliant with antitrust regulations. (The DOJ sued Hachette, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, along with Macmillan and HarperCollins, last year for allegedly colluding to set ebook prices; Hachette, Penguin and S&S all settled.)

Original editorial content along with the algorithm

Bookish has seven full-time editors who each manage different genres and update those sections daily with original book coverage. The site is also soliciting pieces from well-known authors and other public figures. In one ongoing feature, for instance, editors from The Onion review books. Other editorial features at launch include a column by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and an interview between bestselling thriller authors Michael Connelly and Michael Kortya. In addition to that content, the site’s editors are curating columns and lists of books like “The Biggest BFF Breakups in YA Books” and “Big Ideas.”

Advertising, revenue and partnerships

Bookish is collaborating with USA Today’s books website. Its original editorial content will be syndicated on USA Today’s website, and the technology that Bookish uses to let readers view the first chapter of a book and to offer book recommendations will also be included on USA Today’s site. In exchange, Bookish will feature USA Today’s book bestseller lists on bookish.com.

In addition to book sales, Bookish will get revenue from advertising. For now the site’s ad slots are taken up with books from the three launch partners, but eventually the company will expand advertising to other publishers and to companies from outside the book business. Prior to its launch two years ago, Bookish had announced an advertising and content syndication deal with AOL Huffington Post, but that’s off the drawing board for now. A company spokeswoman told me Bookish is “in discussions about continuing to work with AOL in the future.”

Not a focus: Social, self-publishing

Other publishers can sign an agreement with Bookish to add their titles to the site. (Khazaei told me Bookish doesn’t charge publishers anything to join, but they presumably have to fulfill a number of requirements to be included.) However, self-published authors can’t add their books. “The focus right now is on traditionally published titles,” Khazaei said.

Also at launch, the social features that are a key part of Goodreads’ mission are absent from Bookish. Users can’t friend or follow each other — the focus is on a reader’s individual interests. I found that refreshing: Just because you’re Facebook friends with someone doesn’t mean that he or she shares your book preferences, and I prefer the algorithm-driven approach.

When you purchase a digital music track, e-book, digital movie or other type of downloaded content, you aren’t actually buying it, as you would a printed book or CD.  Instead, you’re licensing it, in the same way that you license software.  This means that you get rights to that content that the publisher defines in a license agreement, instead of those granted to you by copyright law.

Digital content licenses typically give users the right to play or read the content.  But what if you want to sell, lend, or give away your digital files?  Under U.S. copyright law, you’re allowed to do this for physical media products, thanks to a concept called the First Sale doctrine.  First Sale says that the publisher has no control over what you do with a media product once you buy it.  Used bookstores, video rental stores, and libraries all owe their existence to First Sale.

Yet current U.S. legal convention dictates that in most cases, First Sale doesn’t apply to digital files.  Very few publishers or retailers give you the right to transfer your files to others.  As a practical matter, “Digital First Sale” would mean that you could transfer ownership of your files to others legally as long as you delete your own copies – including backups, copies in cloud storage, and so on.  This implies one of two things: either you are trusted to delete their copies, or there must be a robust, legally mandated mechanism that does it automatically.

Digital First Sale: Not Now, Maybe Later

The U.S. Copyright Office wrote a report on Digital First Sale in 2001 that described an automatic “forward-and-delete” mechanism, but it determined that it would not be practical to require this by law, nor should people be trusted to delete all of their copies; therefore it recommended maintaining the status quo.

Why is this issue becoming a big deal now?  One reason, ironically, is that most downloaded music files and some e-books are now DRM-free.  If a digital file is encrypted with DRM, then First Sale is usually a moot point: you send copies of the file to friends, but they can’t use in on their devices.  With DRM-free files, you can send your files to other users, who can play or read them; but the licensing agreements under which you bought them probably forbid this.

Amazon in particular is quite explicit about this.  The Amazon Kindle Store Terms of Use, for example, give you rights to e-books “solely for your personal, non-commercial use” and state that “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.”

First Battlefield: Record Labels and Retailers vs. ReDigi

A startup called ReDigi is testing this law by offering a service that allows people to resell “used” digital music files.  Its software includes the type of forward-and-delete function that the Copyright Office contemplated, though it only works with music purchased from iTunes and Amazon.

ReDigi was (unsurprisingly) sued by one of the major record companies, though it has sought to mollify others by offering them a slice of revenue from each transaction.  Yet this puts the company in a strange place: on the one hand, they claim to be enabling a form of First Sale, but on the other hand, they’re undermining the core idea of First Sale by seeking permission from record labels and giving them a piece of the action.

The forces arrayed against ReDigi are formidable.  Digital files are perfect copies: they don’t have scratches, dog-eared pages, or cracked jewel cases.  Retailers don’t want to be undercut by resellers that will force prices down: imagine iTunes’s reaction if “used” files could be sold on eBay.  Publishers don’t want to lose revenue to secondary markets either.  In other words, both the media and content retail industries are dead set against Digital First Sale.

Second Battlefield: Libraries vs. Publishers

The other growing storm over Digital First Sale is library lending of e-books.  Public libraries currently “lend” e-books by distributing them with DRM so that they expire after the libraries’ lending periods.  Yet while First Sale enables libraries to acquire whatever printed titles they want to lend, publishers get to decide which of their titles they will license for e-book lending and on what terms.

One problem with this is that publishers have divergent e-book lending policies.  Macmillan and Simon & Schuster don’t allow e-book lending of their titles at all. HarperCollins provoked outrage from the library community by putting a limit of 26 “lends” on each title, apparently to mimic the shelf life of hardcopy books before they wear out.

The law gives libraries no leverage against publishers in this situation.  Furthermore, libraries are now facing competition from the private sector: for example, Amazon’s Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) allows Amazon Prime members to “borrow” one e-book at a time at no charge.  Availability of e-books through public libraries is likely to deteriorate further into both chaos and irrelevance if nothing is done.

To break the impasse, libraries are pushing for Digital First Sale rights in the law.  Libraries recently joined together with other, better-heeled entities in a lobbying group called the Owners’ Rights Initiative (ORI).  The ORI, which launched back in October, is a “strange bedfellows” coalition of library trade associations, companies such as Chegg (used textbooks) and Redbox (DVD/Blu-ray kiosks) that could expand into resale of digital content, several companies that sell used IT equipment, and last but not least, eBay.  The ORI’s slogan is “You bought it, you own it.”

Digital music resale and library e-book lending are just two of what will undoubtedly be many digital content distribution models that will touch on the issue of Digital First Sale – a law that, like other aspects of copyright, seems increasingly irrelevant as content moves from physical products to formless bits.  As the controversies and lawsuits grow, the inadequacy of the status quo will be increasingly clear.

Bill Rosenblatt is an authority on digital rights management and President of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies

Apple’s fight to obtain the interviews came to light as result of court records that show Amazon attempting to quash the subpoena in Seattle federal court. We don’t know what kind of information Apple is seeking, but some of it would likely relate to Amazon’s ebook pricing practices. Apple attorneys are now trying to transfer Amazon’s motion to the Southern District of New York so that Judge Denise Cote, who is overseeing the case, can rule on it.

Judge Cote has agreed to “promptly address the discovery dispute” if the motion is transferred.

The DOJ’s trial against Apple, Macmillan and Penguin is set to take place next June. Judge Cote recently approved the DOJ’s settlement with three other publishers,  and new ebook prices from one of the setting publishers, HarperCollins, are already in effect. Apple previously suggested that it would appeal the settlement.

Subpoena

Like the Department of Justice in the United States, the European Commission, which began its formal antitrust investigation last December, accused Apple and publishers of colluding to fix ebook prices. While ebook sales made up 15 percent of trade book sales in the US in 2011, and — according to this report from yesterday — 12.9 percent of UK book sales for the first six months of 2012, ebooks are still a tiny sliver of total book sales in other European countries.

The EC reports in its Official Journal (PDF) that “by jointly switching the sale of ebooks from a wholesale model to an agency model with the same key terms on a global basis, the Four Publishers and Apple engaged in a concerted practice with the object of raising retail prices of ebooks in the EEA [European Economic Area, which includes the 27 countries in the European Union plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein],” breaching EEA competition rules.

The EC also calls attention to most-favored nation clauses (MFNs) in Apple’s Agency agreements: “to avoid lower revenues and margins for their ebooks on the iBookstore, the publishers had to pressure other major e-book retailers offering ebooks to their consumers in the EEA to adopt the agency model.”

The Commission notes that Apple and the settling publishers don’t agree with its assessment but have agreed to settle anyway. Macmillan’s parent company Holtzbrinck, which is settling in the EU but not in the United States, said in a statement to The Bookseller, “From the outset, the Holtzbrinck group has strongly denied all charges of collusion in relation to its ebook businesses. That said, we believe it is in the best interests of our European business to proceed towards a settlement and have agreed to this set of draft principles, ready for a period of market consultation.”

Here are the terms of the proposed agreement, which largely mirror those in the ebook settlement in the United States:

• Apple, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan will terminate their agency agreements. Penguin, which is not included in the settlement (the EC is “still investigationg [its] conduct”), also has the option to terminate its agency agreement with Apple; if it doesn’t, Apple will “terminate the agreement in line with the conditions laid down therein.”
• Other retailers, like Amazon, will also have the option to end their agency agreements with the four publishers; if they don’t, the publishers will end them according to the contract terms.
• For two years, the publishers “will not restrict, limit or impede ebook retailers’ ability to set, alter or reduce retail prices for ebooks and/or to offer discounts or promotions.”
• There is some protection for ebook prices under agency agreements, however: “The aggregate value of the price discounts or promotions offered by any retailer should not exceed the aggregate amount equal to the total commissions the publisher pays to that retailer over a 12-month period in connection with the sale of its ebooks to consumers.” In the United States, publishers have the right to negotiate such a clause with retailers. In the EU, however, it appears that the clause is a requirement (i.e., a retailer can’t say no).
• Apple and the four publishers can’t enter ebook contracts with MFN clauses for five years, and “Apple will inform any publisher with which it has an ebook agency agreement that it will not enforce a retail price MFN clause in any such agreement for a period of five years.”

Consumers have a month (starting today) to comment on the proposed settlement. They can send comments “under reference number COMP/39.847/E-BOOKS, either by e-mail (COMP-GREFFE-ANTITRUST@ec.europa.eu), by fax (+32 22950128) or by post, to the following address: European Commission Directorate-General for Competition Antitrust Registry, 1049 Bruxelles/Brussel, BELGIQUE/BELGIË.”

Hachette makes older ebooks available to libraries through digital distributor OverDrive. In an email obtained by Gary Price at Infodocket, Hachette tells libraries using OverDrive that it “will be raising its eBook prices on October 1, 2012 on [its] currently available eBook catalog (~3,500 eBook titles with release dates of April 2010 and earlier). On average prices will increase 220%.”

“We believe these terms fairly reflect the value to the library customer, that the ebooks will not need periodic replacement as do print copies, and there is no limit on amount of borrowing activity per ebook copy,” Hachette VP, communications Sophie Cottrell told me.

Separately, Hachette is testing a pilot program that makes new ebooks available to some libraries. That pilot program is presumably not run with OverDrive but with its competitors like 3M Cloud Library and Baker & Taylor’s Axis360.

Random House is the only big-six publisher to offer unrestricted access to its titles, despite the price increases this spring. Penguin recently ended its relationship with OverDrive and no longer distribute e-books and digital audiobooks to most libraries, though it is running a one-year pilot program with 3M with the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries. Macmillan and Simon & Schuster do not make e-books available to libraries. HarperCollins allows e-books to be checked out 26 times before the library has to buy a new copy.

Photo courtesy of Flickr / Ian Barbour

Background

Recall that publishers and Apple have been in a throw down with the government over the price of ebooks. Government lawsuits say that the publishers’ switch to a commission-style pricing system (like the one used in iTunes) amounted to price-fixing. Three of the five publishers threw in the towel while Apple and two hold-out publishers are fighting in court.

The feds’ lawsuit demands that publishers change their pricing model so that Amazon and others can set the price they want (even it the price is below cost). The lawsuit by the states is instead about money; the states want to collect refunds on behalf of ebook buyers.

Three publishers agreed to pay up several months ago, but it was only on Thursday that the dollar figures finally came out. Meanwhile, Apple and the others are refusing to play ball.

• See also: Everything you need to know about the e-book lawsuit

What the deal means for you: a tiny Kindle or iTunes credit and a long wait

If you bought an e-book from one of the five big publishers between April 1, 2010 and May 23, 2012, you will get a 25-cent refund for each old title you bought and $1.32 if the title was a recent New York Times bestseller. The refund will come in the form of a credit to your Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes account; you’ll get a check if you bought from Sony or Google. The retailers have your email address so it will not be hard to notify you.

This is a micro-windfall that you probably weren’t expecting, so it’s all to the good. The only catch is that it will be a long time coming. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote has to stamp the deal — and there’s a good chance she won’t while the case is ongoing against Apple and two hold-out publishers. Realistically, we’re talking years before that $1.32 credit hits your iTunes account. If the two hold-out publishers and Apple finally decide to settle, you may get another small credit.

What it means for publishers: ebook sales and an escape from the class action lawyers

The three publishers who struck a deal are looking smarter by the minute. The settlement not only gets them out of legal purgatory, it will lead to most of the money they pay coming right back to them. What do you think the average person is going to do with a $1.32 Barnes & Noble credit? That’s right. They will buy an ebook that likely costs $5 or $10. This is almost a net win for the publishers.

Just as important, the settlement lets publishers short-circuit the class action lawyers who are coming at them with a separate lawsuit. Those lawyers, who say they would get more money if they were in charge, are now frozen out because there is no money left to collect on behalf of consumers.

The two hold-out publishers, Macmillan and Penguin, now face a hard choice. They have to decide if their fight to keep commission pricing is worth years of legal bills and uncertainty (keep in mind, they could lose the case and face an even stiffer penalty). Given this choice, it’s possible that the publishers, even if they believe they did nothing wrong, will find it easier to just accept the states’ deal and move on.

What it means for Apple: fighting on

Unlike the publishers, Apple has more lawyers than the state of Connecticut. It can (and will) fight this thing forever. At the same time, Apple has a stronger defense than the publishers — it wasn’t in the room or on the phone when many parts of the alleged conspiracy took place.

Apple, which says it did nothing wrong, may also be concerned with protecting the commission model of its iTunes store (if the government wins on ebooks, will it come after apps or music pricing next?).

Finally, if the two other publishers fold and join the settlement, the government may quietly close the case against Apple rather than risk losing an expensive and high-profile court fight.

What it means for the government: election year headlines

The settlement is a trophy for Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen and his counterparts around the country. They can tell voters, shortly before November elections, that they have won refunds for home state consumers.

This is a big fudge, of course. According to Beth Farmer, an antitrust professor at UPenn, the court is unlikely to approve the deal while the dispute with Apple, Macmillan and Penguin is ongoing. ”The notice and claims process is going to be complicated and it wouldn’t be efficient for the states to do that multiple times,” said Farmer by email last month.

Andre Barlow, a former Justice Department lawyer and antitrust expert, is also skeptical. “It’s not a clean way of doing this but it probably makes sense for the states to do it this way … At least they’ll have a big headline.”

(Image by Pagina via Shutterstock)

The states accuse Apple of colluding with publishers to set ebook prices. Apple and the other two publishers in the case — Macmillan and Penguin — are not settling, but the states’ settlement would provide payouts to consumers who bought ebooks from Macmillan and Penguin as well.

“This action sends a strong message that this sort of anticompetitive behavior will not be accepted,” said Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen, who led the states’ investigation into ebook pricing along with the state of Texas. “Through our ongoing litigation, we hope to provide additional restitution to consumers. Additionally, I’m especially proud of the exemplary bipartisan cooperation on both the state and federal level on this matter, which involved 54 states and jurisdictions working together on behalf of consumers across the country.”

The states’ proposed settlement with publishers is not yet available online, but reports from various state newspapers are trickling out this evening. If the settlement is approved, eligible Connecticut ebook buyers would receive up to $1.26 million in total compensation, for example, while Washington ebook buyers would receive up to $2 million, Maryland ebook buyers would receive up to $1.64 million and Hawaii ebook buyers would receive up to $300,000. In addition, the settling publishers would pay $7.5 million in court fees.

How will consumers be paid? Baltimore’s ABC News reports that “in most cases, consumers may choose to receive the value of their restitution by check or by crediting the amount to future purchases of e-books. E-book retailers Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and Kobo have agreed to identify and contact each eligible customer by email.  Retailers Google and Sony will also notify affected customers. Sony will inform customers that checks will automatically be issued. Google customers will be directed to submit a claim on a settlement website.”

Payments are set to begin 30 days after the settlement’s approval.

The Department of Justice’s proposed settlement with HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, which is vehemently opposed by many in the book publishing industry and related fields, is still awaiting approval from U.S. District Judge Denise Cote. The DOJ received 868 public comments on the proposed settlement, with the majority of them against it. Cote has granted Barnes & Noble, the American Booksellers Association, the Authors Guild and attorney and music industry executive Bob Kohn, all of whom oppose the settlement, permission to act as “friends of the court” and weigh in on the settlement in amici curiae briefs.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Mohd Hasmi Hamidi.