DRM Lawsuit Filed By Independent Bookstores Against Amazon, "Big Six" Publishers

concealment writes "Three independent bookstores are taking Amazon and the so-called Big Six publishers (Random House, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan) to court in an attempt to level the playing field for book retailers. If successful, the lawsuit could completely change how ebooks are sold. The class-action complaint, filed in New York on Feb 15., claims that by entering into confidential agreements with the Big Six publishers, who control approximately 60 percent of print book revenue in the U.S., Amazon has created a monopoly in the marketplace that is designed to control prices and destroy independent booksellers."

Re:High or Low?

[wallsg]

No ad hominem meant. It was supposed to be a light-hearted joke but everyone's so sensitive these days that everything's offensive to someone. And I'll be 50 this year so get off my lawn.

So when they actually do something, that is the time to catch them. Basic principle of justice - you can't punish someone for something they haven't done yet.

They are being accused of doing something now. It's called predatory pricing [wikipedia.org]. It's illegal for a business with a dominate position to routinely sell a product under cost in order to drive competitors out of the market (or keep them from entering).

Now, whether it should be is a topic for a different argument about economic systems.

In Europe, from what I understand, anti-trust laws are meant to protect competitors and here they're meant to protect consumers. As the linked page above says, since it's consumers that are supposed to be protected and not rivals, there's a high bar to winning these complaints.

Re:Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus

[dgatwood]

It's the device's job to handle standard formats, and most of them do it rather well.

You've obviously never tried to do anything even slightly interesting in EPUB. If you attempt drop caps and you want consistent rendering, you'll tear your hair out literally for months.

Here's a short list of the reader bugs that I've found personally:

• Destination anchors () incorrectly rendered as links (underlined and blue).
• ADE-based readers ignore the entire CSS file if it contains @media rules (and maybe @page). Put them in a separate CSS file.
• Same goes for the IE-specific filter property.
• Nook refuses to center heading tags (h1, h2, and so on). Use div.
• ADE and Nook (based on ADE) do not support the OpenType small-caps feature. You can work around this by using a separate small caps font in which the lowercase glyphs are replaced by small caps glyphs.
• If you are working around this ADE bug by using a separate small caps font instead of a normal font with a smcp OpenType feature, be sure to add font-variant: small-caps not only in any CSS styles that request the font, but also in the @font declaration for the style. If you forget to add it in the @font declaration, some readers (Sony Reader in particular) will fall back to the next font that has either an smcp feature or a separate small-cap variant style.
• ADE and Nook (based on ADE) do not support the use of the :before pseudo-element with the content: property.
• Some readers get very unhappy when embedded fonts have multiple local names.
• When creating drop caps, avoid padding-bottom; many readers compute the vertical position incorrectly if padding is nonzero. Instead use margins to set the vertical positioning of drop caps, which seems to be more compatible.
• When working with drop caps, always explicitly set the line height to 1.2 em (or more), both for the body text and the drop cap block. Some readers (Kindle, IIRC) set lower bounds on line height, and some fonts have an intrinsic line height that is less than 1.2em. Those readers may force the line height up to 1.2em on your behalf, resulting in the drop cap character appearing too high or too low in those readers.
• Nested block and inline-block elements are problematic on some readers. In particular, Nook on iOS appears to ignore (treat as zero) the margins of inline-block elements when drawing the contents of any block elements that appear inside them. Thus, if you are doing drop caps, you must not use nested block elements for positioning purposes if you care about supporting Nook on iOS.
• Some readers incorrectly calculate block element height when computed in ems. In particular, Nook on iOS tends to undersize its boxes. This can result in drop caps that overlap text. When setting the height CSS property for drop caps, find the smallest value and the largest value that result in correct behavior on a proper web browser (e.g. WebKit or Firefox), then choose a value that is somewhere near the middle of this range.
• Don't count on CSS precedence working correctly. Readers based on Adobe Digital Editions sometimes fail to treat classes in a selector as having a higher precedence than containing elements. For example, in spec-compliant readers and browsers, if you have a rule on "div.preface div.section p + p", a contrary rule on "p.classname" should override it, because a class on the selector for the element itself always has higher precedence than any number of elements). In ADE, however, the precedence calculation is broken, and the "div.preface div.section p + p" rule gets precedence.
• In Kobo reader (at least on iOS), if you set the left and right margins of the body tag to zero, you will see part of page 2 on page 1, and so on, and you will be unable to reach the last page of a chapter.
• In some iOS readers based on Adobe Digital Editions (seen on Sony Reader and Bluefire), if a paragraph containing a drop cap falls a