Consumer Federation of America Blasts Critics of DOJ's Ebook Price Fixing Lawsuit

Posted on June 25, 2012

In a statement issued today the Consumer Federation of America blasted critics of the Justice Department's lawsuit against Apple and major book publishers for ebook price fixing. The CFA is a nonprofit organization that says the lawsuit and the settlement benefit consumers. The CFA refers to the defendants as a "price fixing cartel" which makes them sound like drug dealers:

In order to defend cartel agency pricing the brick and mortar bookstores and celebrity authors have had to concoct a description of the market in which bookstores are squeezed between two much more efficient distribution models – big box mass marketers on the one side and long-tail e-tailers on the other.

The CFA blasts celebrity authors and the Authors Guild for being out of touch Luddites who've gotten the law dead wrong:

These arguments against the settlement are wrong. They are based on misrepresentations of the purpose and intent of the antitrust laws and erroneous assumptions about and faulty analysis of the economics and nature of competition in the digital era of book publishing.

You can read the entire statement here in a .pdf file.