Apple's ebook price-fixing court battle enters Canada

It hasn’t been long since the filing of the ebook lawsuit in the U.S. before other countries followed, now Normand Painchaud has filed a similar lawsuit in Canada, according to reports the lawsuit states that “Apple and its partner ebook publishers colluded to artificially inflate the price of content offered through the iBookstore.”

The problem under scrutiny is Apple’s  “agency model” which basically means that publishers can to set ebook pricing under a “most favored nations” clause that forces companies to sell the products at the same prices through all of their distributors. The “agency model” is far more attractive to publishing houses than the “wholesale model” previously used by Amazon to offer below-cost pricing in order to draw customers.

The Quebec class-action suit was filed under the name Antoine Pontbriand and reads:

The anti-competitive nature of this conspiracy, and the Publisher Respondents’ motivation to control ebook pricing, is also revealed by the fact that the price of an ebook in many cases now approaches – or even exceeds – the price of the same book in paper even though there are almost no incremental costs to produce each additional ebook unit.

The publishing houses HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan and Penguin are the publishers named alongside Apple in the allegations.