The accusations says that Amazon has been secretly working with selected publishers to stifle their competition.
According to these allegations against Amazon, it says that Amazon has been working in the back with 5 other book publishers to sabotage the prices when it comes to e-books. This was reported by The Wall Street Journal. Hagens Berman is the firm that filed the lawsuit against Amazon for hacking the prices of e-books with 5 publishes—these publishers are HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, all these publishers have allegations that they pay high commissions to Amazon to increase the retail prices of the e-books that are sold on the website.
The price that is listed on Amazon for the e-books is the same price that publishers charge numerous retailers also making sure no one sells the e-books for lower prices that basically is like preventing other people to sell e-books at the prices they want. The allegations also say that the 5 publishers have more than 80 percent e-books published on the platform, and also says that all of this is a conspiracy to fix the prices of the e-books when it comes to their retail prices. The lawsuit puts this in the antitrust law.
So far, no word has been officially said by Amazon as they have clearly declined to even place a single comment on the matter, nor has Penguin Random House said any word. As far as other publishers go who have the same allegations, they still haven’t responded to any of the questions posed to them by numerous media outlets which in itself says that there was something going on, but we can’t be sure what exactly. Only time will tell what the real deal is behind the scenes.
