All eyes will surely be on e-book prices now following the decision last week by Judge Cote to wave through the settlement agreements in the US between the Department of Justice and Hachette Book Group USA, Simon & Schuster Inc, and HarperCollins US. Harper US has already struck new deals with retailers, and as a consequence many of its e-book titles are now being discounted on e-bookseller sites.

The New York Times reports $9.99 prices on Amazon.com for HC US bestsellers including The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva, but this may just be the beginning. One perhaps unintended consequence of the judge's ruling is that e-book list prices have risen, so as to allow individual retailers to discount and deliver to the consumer e-books at the prices they were paying before the agency agreements were lifted.

How long this holds is an open question. Idea Logical's Mike Shatzkin says the settlement agreements were "actually designed to unleash broad and deep discounting in the ebook marketplace and I think we’ll see evidence very soon that it will succeed in that objective beyond anybody’s wildest dreams". Shatzkin believes that Amazon will lead that discounting. Not everyone agrees though. Nate Hoffelder, who writes The Digital Reader blog, says that Amazon is now committed to earning money from selling content, rather than from device sales, a subtle shift, he believes, in strategy.

Whatever Hoffelder thinks, there is no real indication that Amazon's view on pricing is likely to change anytime soon—just ask Sony—but the new settlement agreements do put in place some restrictions, as might Amazon's own shareholders. According to Shatzkin an Amazon executive told him that the company made money on 75% of its content sales, but that does not mean it wants publishers to retain their margin, or that in deep-discounting a small range of bestsellers, Amazon won't ultimately further undermine publishers' physical businesses, and force other publishers to follow suit with bigger discounts on their digital titles. Watching this play-out will be interesting, even if the result already seems a certainty.