http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/apple-guilty-of-conspiring-to-raise-e-book-prices/
The full decision makes for some interesting reading:
http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/cases/show.php?db=special&id=306
Some of the statements from the Judge are pretty scathing of what they did. Financial penalties are still to be decided.
Good. I'm not naive enough to think Amazon and Google are shining knights. Here's hoping the fines are substantial. In the UK it would be up to 10% of turnover for upto five years. It will be interesting to see what the US do.
The US vs Apple. I imagine the punishment will be relatively low relative to the damage they did. The eBook industry was irreparably damaged by this, book prices across the board jumped >30% overnight for all retailers (the graph is incredibly damning evidence). That's an industry that looked like it was about to take off...potentially worth billions, and it got shot in the foot by book retailers to try and maintain traditional book sales.
eBook sales were growing exponentially until that point...and I'm aware that can't go on forever, ebooks currently make up somewhere between 10 and 50% of the sales of some top books and only make up 22% of publishers revenue...which considering the prices are similar, suggests there's plenty of room for growth in the industry.
I like Amazon's attempt to get authors to publish direct for a much larger cut, but ultimately the publishers still hold a great deal of power and can threaten smaller authors who step out of line. Give it a decade and the stores will gradually become the publishers. Giving advances to artists etc. It's already started with Netflix, producing original content...slower than I'd expected, since MTV has been doing it for a very long time, it seems the obvious way to go for companies like Amazon and Google too.