E-commerce giant is giving e-book buyers free money

And you get more if you bought a best-seller. BuzzFeed News reported.

Following a court ruling that it was involved in ebook price-fixing with five publishers, Apple has started the process of paying back $400m in refunds.

Customers who bought the affected ebooks with store credit in their accounts on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and iTunes will get their money back.

Interestingly, the payouts will not necessarily reach customers direct from Apple. Refunds are being issued through four ebook stores -- iTunes, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo -- and Amazon customers (Kindle users) should be getting their credit today.

If you're in line for a refund, you should have received an email informing you, but in case this made its way to your spam folder, you can manually check to see if you've benefitted.

Customers will get a $6.93 credit for every e-book bought between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012 that was a New York Times bestseller, according to the class action law firm Hagens Berman.

For books not on the best-seller list, it’s a $1.57 credit per book. The payouts are not just for Amazon customers, but also those who bought e-books from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple.

The New York Times reported in 2014 that the settlement would reach “up to 23 million customers.”

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