Plaintiff booksellers filed a motion urging the court not to dismiss the earlier e-book lawsuit filed against Amazon and six other major publishing houses.

Three independent booksellers - New York's Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, the South Carolina-based Fiction Addiction and New York City's Posman Books filed a lawsuit Feb. 22 accusing Amazon and six other major publishing houses (Penguin, Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan) of creating an e-book monopoly that is destroying other booksellers. The contracts between the publishers and Amazon established that Amazon would use digital rights management technology (DRM) to prevent unauthorized sharing or copying of eBooks.

Last week, Amazon and the six defending publishing houses submitted a filing saying that the booksellers' lawsuit against them is without merit. Now, the booksellers have filed another motion urging the Court not to dismiss the case as there is enough evidence to keep the case going.

"Having developed and successfully exploited its Kindle e-book reader, which dominates the e-reader market, Amazon entered into written contracts with the Big Six that facially blessed the use of an Amazon controlled digital rights management technology ("DRM") on the Big Six's e-books," the bookseller motion notes. "The restrictive DRM, in conjunction with the contracts with the Big Six, operates to protect Amazon's e-reader monopoly. In addition, independent brick-and-mortar bookstores have been foreclosed from effective entry into the e-book market. As a result, consumers of e-books have been deprived of the benefits of choice and of the innovations that would surely have evolved had Amazon's monopolies been challenged."

In Amazon's defending motion, the company stated that the booksellers could not show "any actual adverse effect on competition" and that the suit was based on "naked conclusions that Amazon's use of 'device specific' DRM technology harms competition."

To this, the booksellers have replied that Amazon and the publishing houses are either misreading their compliant or "rewriting" it in court in order to gain a dismissal.

"The big six do not, and cannot, deny that they each entered into agreements with Amazon, and then, with full knowledge of the market and the technology being used and available, renewed those agreements regarding the DRM technology that was to be used on all of the e-books published by the big six and distributed by Amazon," the booksellers state. "Discovery will reveal that there was indeed a meeting of the minds between the Big Six and Amazon.