A deal is a deal except when it isn’t, apparently, as the Department of Justice has asked Judge Denise Cote to essentially throw out the settlement terms she already approved and ratified for Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster (and is about to issue final orders on for Macmillan and Penguin) — and impose a harsher set of selling conditions on the publishers as part of the “punishment” of Apple following Judge Cote’s finding of guilt. They now want five years of no agency at all for ebooks at Apple, with the expressed hope that those terms spread […]
