That's the initial judgement. The appeal is still in the works. Could be years before Apple gives up.
So the price increase that caused all this took place several years ago. Hopefully when the dust settles we can expect to see prices drop. There is little excuse for selling e-books at higher prices than printed versions, given the much much higher cost of production and transportation of printed media, and it's not like any of the increased profit goes to the authors. By attempting to force Amazon (and by extension all other online sellers) to move to an "agency" model, the publishers were basically attempting to rake off all that cream for themselves.
They're trying to pull similar tricks on libraries - new library e-book contracts are being written with a limited amount of "reads" that each book is allowed, on the order of 28. The excuse is that library books wear out and get replaced, but e-books never wear out, so the publishers are allegedly trying to make up for presumed losses.
In the first place, books don't wear out after a mere 28 times read. Because this is so, quite often when a book finally wears out it is so old and so long out of fashion that it is never replaced at all. Even paperbacks, which admittedly don't last nearly as long as hardbacks, tend not to be replaced.
In short, publishers are doing their level best to really wring the last penny out of the consumer over the issue of e-books. In the long run they're fighting a losing battle. I expect to see more and more authors moving to self-publishing, which costs pretty close to nothing when done in e-format, and given the very low per-book-profit that the author actually receives, even if half the people who read their books pirated them, they'd still be making craploads more than they do when its funneled through the greedy fingers of publishers.
Its true that good publishers do more than just print a book; but I can see a niche market springing up for talented editors, where authors would hire an editor to perform that function.
