If you’ve bought a Kindle book in the past few years, check out your inbox this morning: There may be a nice little surprise from Amazon.com.
Thanks to an antitrust settlement with book publishers, thousands of Amazon customers were given credits today depending on certain e-book titles they purchased between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012. GeekWire reporter Blair Hanley Frank, as you can see below, found a cool $2.92 sitting in his Amazon account this morning.
The credits are a result of the case that involved five publishers —Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Penguin — who allegedly conspired with Apple to fix e-book prices and were forced to issue the refunds as part of a settlement, which total $166 million. The credits, calculated based on the type and quantity of books a customer purchased, will automatically be applied to any Amazon book purchases — print or Kindle format — and expire on March 31, 2015. More details of the settlement can be found here.
Those who bought e-books from Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Apple will also receive credits, and those who bought e-books from Sony will receive checks in the mail.
Apple, meanwhile, continues to fight the lawsuit in court and filed its much-anticipated appeal in the case last month.