Dear Authors, Illustrators and Agents,
Today we agreed to settle our case with the DOJ. We settled because the potential penalties became too high to risk even the possibility of an unfavorable outcome.
There are two reasons we did not settle earlier. First, the settlement called for a level of e-book discounting we believed would be harmful to the industry. We felt that if only three of the big six publishers were required to discount and we stood firm, those problems might be avoided. But when Random House agreed to be bound by the Penguin settlement, it became clear that all five of the other big six publishers would be allowing the whole agent’s commission to be used as discount, and Macmillan’s stand-alone selling at full agency price would have no impact on the overall marketplace. And in addition, your books and our business would have a pricing disadvantage for two years.
The second reason was simpler. I had an old fashioned belief that you should not settle if you have done no wrong. As it turns out, that is indeed old fashioned.
