To the casual observer, the e-book revolution has produced two bumper crops: smutty trilogies à la "Fifty Shades of Grey" and lawsuits. First there were the authors (as represented by the Authors Guild), who sued Google Books for digitizing their work without permission. Then the Department of Justice sued five publishers and Apple for adopting a policy known as the agency model. Finally, a trio of independent booksellers filed a class-action suit last week against the six largest book publishers and Amazon, accusing them of collaborating to create a monopoly on e-book sales and shutting small retailers out of the market.
The booksellers — Fiction Addiction of Greenville, S.C., Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, N.Y., and Posman Books of New York City — are demanding the right to sell what they term "open-source and DRM-free" e-books, files that can be read on a Kindle or any other e-reading device. The publishers are accused of entering into "confidential agreements" with Amazon making this impossible.