BERLIN — The European Commission said Wednesday that it was prepared to drop its investigation into the fixing of e-book prices by Apple and four European publishers after the companies agreed to let online retailers like Amazon sell e-books at a discount for two years.
The commission's proposed settlement agreement, which is now subject to peer review, would end a nine-month-old antitrust inquiry into Apple and the publishers — Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS Corp.; HarperCollins, a unit of News Corp.; Hachette Livre, owned by the French publisher Lagardère; and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, of Germany.
The commission's antitrust arm opened the investigation last December, and the companies had faced penalties of up to 10 percent of their global sales if they had been found to be fixing prices. One publisher still under investigation, the Penguin Group, owned by Pearson, did not participate in the voluntary offer to settle the suit.
The commission asserted that the publishers had intentionally set up distribution deals with Apple, which sells books through iTunes for iPhones and iPads, to thwart the ability of major online sellers like Amazon to dictate reduced prices for their titles.
The proposed agreement, which will be open to comment from affected businesses for a month, echoes a similar pact reached in the United States in April between the U.S. Department of Justice and HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette. The publishers agreed to pay $69 million to settle the U.S. price-fixing case.
A U.S. judge in New York approved the agreement on Sept. 6.
One British author, Damien Seaman, said the commission's proposal could open the nascent market for electronic books to lesser-known writers, who could then price their novels competitively to attract readers without being held to the artificial price floors set by conventional publishers.
"This decision is potentially great news," said Mr. Seaman, whose e-book crime novel "The Killing of Emma Gross" was published last year by Blasted Heath, an e-book publisher in Glasgow. "It will allow us to continue to price dynamically and experiment with discounts and offers to get more visibility with readers, and to stop the larger publishers from trying to strangle the growth of a dynamic, independent e-book market."
Under the commission's proposed settlement, Apple and the publishers also agreed to refrain from making "most favored nation" arrangements. In those agreements, the publishers promised to refrain from making deals with other retailers to sell their books at lower prices for a period of five years.
Should the proposed settlement agreement receive favorable reviews from European industry peers, the commission said it might make the plan and its concessions legally binding on Apple and the four publishers. Such an arrangement would effectively end the antitrust case without an admission of guilt on the part of Apple or the four publishers.
A spokesman for Apple in Europe could not be immediately reached for comment. Anne Bergman-Tahon, the director of the Federation of European Publishers, an industry group in Brussels, declined to comment and referred questions to the individual publishers. A spokesman for Amazon in Europe, Matt Lambert, did not return a request for comment.
The European market for e-books, with the exception of Britain, is less developed than that in the United States, often because printed books in Europe are levied reduced rates of value-added tax, while e-books are levied the full rate.
According to a research report by O'Reilly Media, a publisher of technology research based in Sebastopol, California, e-books accounted for 6 percent of the market in Britain in 2011. E-books accounted for just 1.6 percent of total European book sales in 2011, according to Futuresource Consulting, a research firm in Dunstable, England. But e-books are expected to make up 16 percent of book sales in the region by 2016, according to the research firm.
In Britain, 45 percent of e-book owners still read their books on a personal computer or laptop, not e-readers like Amazon's Kindle or Sony's e-reader, according to O'Reilly. In Germany, 40 percent of new books are released both in the electronic and paper format.
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE 20 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/global/agreement-could-end-europes-e-book-price-fixing-inquiry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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