Apple suffered a final defeat in its legal fight with the Justice Department over e-books Monday, when the Supreme Court refused to hear the company’s appeal. When the case was filed in April 2012 it was seen as a fight over the future of the digital book industry, with Apple Inc. and the five biggest publishers aligned against Amazon.com Inc. While Apple and its allies lost in court, their vision for the industry won out. It hasn’t been good for e-books. 

The Apple case centered on whether publishers or online retailers  would determine the prices for e-books. At the time, Amazon was selling e-books at a loss, buying a book for, say, $14.99 but then charging Kindle users just $9.99. Publishers worried that tactic would train customers to expect books to come cheap forever. Apple came along and offered to let publishers set their own prices. But the Justice Department thought the cooperation between Apple and the publishers to drive up the price of e-books was anti-competitive. The courts agreed.  More