Human Resource Selection 9th Edition by Marianne Jennings

Exercise 13

Booklocker, Inc. is a print-on-demand (POD)book company that specializes in handling the printing of a run of books when there is an online order for those books. Amazon.com facilitated such orders by having customers pay up front for a print run and then placing the order with a POD company. Amazon is the dominant channel for those who wish to order books that are not available for immediate purchase but must be done through a POD. In April 2005, Amazon acquired BookSurge, another POD company. BookSurge's prices are generally higher than those of other POD companies. On February 10, 2008, Amazon began notifying publishers that Amazon would only continue to sell POD books through the Direct Amazon Sales Channel if the publisher agreed to print its books through BookSurge. If publishers and authors wanted to have the POD sales, they had to use Amazon's printing company. (Brick-and-mortar retailers such as Borders and Barnes Noble do not handle PODs.)Are there any antitrust issues with this requirement? [ BookLocker.com, Inc. v Amazon.com, Inc. 650 F.Supp.2d 89 (D. Me. 2009)]