A Guide to Spending Your E-Book Antitrust Loot on Amazon

Do you own a Kindle? If so, check your e-mail inbox because there’s a good chance you’ve received a nice, little present from Amazon.com. If you bought an e-book from certain publishers—Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan, or HarperCollins—from April 1, 2010, to May 21, 2012, you will be getting money back from the settlement of a price-fixing suit brought by the federal government against the publishers. (The government also sued Apple, which hasn’t settled.) A book from the New York Times bestseller list pays back $3.17, and other titles will return $0.73 to the buyer—unless you live in Minnesota, where you’ll get $3.93 or $0.94, respectively.

The only catch—of course, there’s a catch—is that you can use the Amazon credit only to buy print books or e-books. I got $2.19, which is exactly the price of Mystical Mandala Coloring Book. It’s not much, but the text is in stock and should arrive in two days.