Following news of a longstanding investigation of Amazon’s control over the ebook market by the Connecticut Attorney General, class action law firm Hagens Berman sued Amazon in the US District Court of New York’s Southern District. They allege antitrust violations of the Sherman Act. The filing is both fascinating and bizarre, a kind of deja vu all over again that also sees the law firm now complaining about what they themselves helped wrought. Hagens Berman was the first mover in the earlier lawsuits against book publishers and Apple over the introduction of the agency model for pricing ebooks, filing the […]
Mug Shots
Last year we quietly added a Screenshot View to every new deal to help make it easy to capture and share individual reports — but as usual, creative authors (and their friends) are leading the way in innovation. So far, we have seen at least three of these deals as mugs:
Connecticut Has Been Investigating Amazon’s Publisher eBook Contracts — For Some Time
A decade after the ambitious Connecticut Attorney General (now US senator Richard Blumenthal) joined the ambitious Texas Attorney General (now Texas governor Greg Abbott) in helping to provide Amazon with a government-enhanced strangehold on the ebook market, a new Connecticut AG has been investigating Amazon for a while. The office of AG William Tong “has an active and ongoing antitrust investigation into Amazon regarding potentially anticompetitive terms” in its contract with major publishers. Tong’s statement said, “Our office continues to aggressively monitor this market to protect fair competition for consumers, authors, and other e-book retailers.” In the past, this office […]
People: Richman to Co-Lead Media Rights at UTA, Trimmer to Head MTV Books Relaunch
UTA has promoted book-to-film agent Jason Richman to co-lead its Media Rights Group, alongside Keya Khayatian. Richman has been at UTA since 2010. The agency says that the department has closed over 250 deals in the past year, licensing literary properties for film and TV. Separately, Christian Trimmer will lead a relaunch of MTV Books. Trimmer will report to MTV Entertainment president of content and chief content officer Nina Diaz. The imprint will publish in partnership with Simon & Schuster, housed within the branded publishing group of Simon & Schuster Children’s, with director of branded publishing Kara Sargent as the […]
Publishers Are Holding or Bifurcating Foundry Payments
Following our story from last week on authors receiving bad checks from Foundry Literary + Media for payments due — along with advocacy from the Authors Guild — we have learned that multiple large publishers have moved quickly to protect authors’ funds. The Penguin Random House royalty department told a representative of Foundry in an email shown to PL that they “have had several authors request bifurcated payments” and would be granting those requests. (When bifurcating payments, the publisher pays directly to the author their share — usually 85 percent — and pays the agency commission only directly to the […]
Wattpad Said to be Looking for A Big Sale
After receiving unsolicited interest from a US internet company last fall, Wattpad is reported to have invited bids for the company. The company is “now in active talks with multiple interested parties and could sign a deal as early as this month,” the Globe and Mail reports. By their account they are “in talks with multiple parties to potentially sell the enterprise for upward of $500 million.” The company told the paper, “We don’t have any news to share.” While the platform has lots of users — 90 million a month — after more than 14 years it still does […]