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Booksellers File Antitrust Lawsuit Against Amazon, Publishers

The second shot in law firm Hagens Berman fight against Amazon has been fired.

The firm put out a press release on Thursday announcing that they had found booksellers willing to sue Amazon over an alleged conspiracy with publishers.

 

Retail booksellers today hit Amazon.com and publishing companies with a class-action lawsuit alleging a massive price-fixing scheme to intentionally constrain the bookselling market and inflate the wholesale price of print books, according to Hagens Berman and its co-counsel Sperling & Slater P.C.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Mar. 25, 2021, and states that Amazon colluded with the Big Five U.S. book publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster – to restrain competition in the sale of print trade books, or non-academic texts such as fiction and non-fiction material.

This is essentially a follow on to the case Hagens Berman filed in January against Amazon and the Big Five publishers.

It has the same basic claim (that Amazon conspired with publishers to raise ebook prices) and the same lack of evidence to back up the claim. The only thing new here is the change in defendants; rather than consumers, Hagens Berman’s client is a bookstore.

Folks, as I have said before, I would love to see the agency contracts broken, but I just don’t see how Hagens Berman is going to win this case. If they have any evidence of a conspiracy, they did not put it in their filings.

Did I miss something?

image by steakpinball via Flickr

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