Apple
Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Because of a lawsuit over e-book prices that was settled years ago, you may have credits that can be applied to purchases on Amazon waiting in your Amazon account.To check if you have credits, simply click this link.
But even if you have credits from the settlement, you have to use them by Saturday - today - or they'll expire.
Last March, the Supreme Court declined to hear a long-running case about Apple price-fixing e-books, making an earlier $400 million settlement final.
For the past year, Apple's been paying it out. You might have credits for free e-books waiting in your inbox - but, as a reminder, they expire on Saturday.
Here's how it works:
- You're eligible if you bought an e-book from a large publishing company between April 1, 2010, and May 21, 2012.
- Those books could have been purchased not just from Apple's iBooks, but Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.
- Those credits will be automatically applied to the account where you bought the e-books unless you requested a paper check years ago.
- If you're eligible, you'll receive a $6.93 credit for any New York Times bestseller and $1.57 for any other e-book from a large publisher.
The law firm that's handling the payouts has a lot more information along with a FAQ. Make sure you check your old email address, too.
If you're wondering why Apple is paying for Amazon credits, it's a long and fascinating story. But essentially, the complaint was that Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue strong-armed major publishers into a pricing agreement that ended up causing e-book prices to spike overnight.
The judgment was handed down in 2013, and Apple started sending iTunes credits to customers in 2014.
Once again, you can check if you got any Amazon credits here.
Here's one of the emails that's going out to eligible customers:
BI
According to Amazon, here is how you apply those credits to a purchase:
Eligible customers do not need to do anything to receive these credits. If you are eligible, we have already calculated your credit for you and added it to your Amazon account. As long as you have credit remaining we will automatically apply it to your purchase of qualifying items through Amazon.com, an Amazon device or an Amazon app. The credit applied to your purchase will appear in your order summary as a gift card during checkout and in your account history. Eligible customers should have received a notification email from Amazon on June 21, 2016. This credit will expire at 11:59 p.m. HST on June 24, 2017.