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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/amazon-colluded-with-publishers-to-fix-book-prices-class-action-suit-alleges/ [arstechnica.com]

A small independent bookstore filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon last week, alleging that the e-commerce giant colluded with the five major book publishers to fix wholesale prices and block other sellers “from competing on price or product availability.”

The suit [hbsslaw.com] seeks to compensate independent booksellers for Amazon’s and publishers’ practices and put an injunction on the alleged anticompetitive practices. The named plaintiff is Bookends and Beginnings, a physical and online bookstore located in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. Amazon, which got its start selling books during the dot-com boom, has dominated the retail book market in recent years, selling an estimated [bloomberg.com] 90 percent of all e-books and over 40 percent of physical books.
[...]
The class-action lawsuit seeks unspecified damages to compensate booksellers. In previous years, book publishers have paid tens of millions of dollars to settle price-fixing lawsuits, and Apple paid $450 million in a settlement after its appeal to the Supreme Court was denied.

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