A few lucky Amazon Kindle users are getting extra-buying credits starting on Tuesday, thanks to a $166 million settlement (of this Apple e-book price fixing case) which returns a portion of money spent to customers who purchased e-books by one or more of five publishers.
“Illegal actions by these publishers forced consumers in New York and across the nation to pay artificially inflated prices for e-books,” New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman said in a statement.
The settlements come individually as credits to Kindle users via their Amazon accounts, in the following amounts (heads up, Minnesota – you’ve got your own payout table, because your state reached a separate settlement):
According to this Amazon table, if you’re a Minnesotan who purchased one New York Times bestseller and one “other” e-book on your Amazon Kindle, your credit would total $4.87. That is, if you didn’t opt-out of the settlement prior to October 21, 2013.
For a sum as large as $166 million, you might think hundreds of people would have already taken to the web to celebrate their hard-won (well, not exactly) rewards. A survey of tweets relating to “Amazon” “Kindle” “ebook” (with and without a hyphen) and “settlement” keywords show the total (including two Marketplace employees who reported credits) rings up to (drum roll please)…
…about $911.62.
RebelMouse helped Marketplace to create a custom collection of winnings as they are tweeted: rebelmouse.com/ebooksettlement. Add up the math yourself as the tweets continue and tell us what you come up with.
At this rate, how long will it take to sum up to $166 million dollars? Not everyone will tweet about their new earnings, and in fact, most people won’t based on what we know of active Twitter users.
Still, $166 million passed out in increments of $0.73 is a lot of change at the bottom of a lot of e-purses.
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