adminThe lawsuit comes a day after Apple surpassed $600bn in value.
The increase affirmed its position as the world’s most valuable firm.
“To effectuate their conspiracy, the publisher defendants teamed up with defendant Apple, which shared the same goal of restraining retail price competition in the sale of e-books,” according to papers filed in New York’s Southern District court on Wednesday morning.
“Apple facilitated the publisher defendants’ collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their transition to an agency model across all retailers.”
Unconfirmed reports suggest that Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster have already settled their cases.
The Department of Justice is due to hold a press conference shortly.
Apple, which sells books through its iBooks platform on the iPad and iPhone, declined to comment.
Electronic books are sold according to a different formula from that governing the sales of physical books.
For most physical books publishers set a wholesale price, often about half the cover price, and then let a retailer decide how much they actually want to charge for the title.
This model was initially adopted for e-books but has since been changed for what is known as an agency model.
Under this scheme, publishers set the price of a book and the agent selling it gets a 30 percent cut.
This model was adopted by publishers largely at the prompting of the late Steve Jobs.
The shift to agency pricing was also seen as a protective measure to head off attempts by Amazon to corner the market in e-books.
It had been aggressively cutting prices to win customers over to its Kindle e-book reader.
Amazon once tried to apply the wholesale model on book publishers — but was rebuffed by the publishers. — BBC.
Online Reporter