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Several million customers did not "welcome" agency pricing. Fictionwise did not welcome agency pricing.
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Fictionwise is owned by Barnes & Noble-a supporter of agency pricing. As for consumers, well, of course, they like low prices in the short term! I was talking about publishers and booksellers, as you well know.
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Agency pricing has basically destroyed Fictionwise; their entire economic model was based on features that are incompatible with agency pricing. It's damaged several other sites that counted on the ability to offer coupons and promo discounts to compete with larger ebook stores.
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Yet Fictionwise still exists. Now you are right, they can't gain market share by offering discounts as much as they used to. But companies exist not merely to gain market share; rather they exist to make PROFIT.Now I don't know what Fictionwise's long term prospects are now: I do know that they would have been unlikely to survive a price war with Amazon, which would have eaten the big fish first, then the little fish.
Anyway, I know there is no way to convince ebook consumers who are focused on low prices that agency pricing could possibly be good, so I'm not going to try.
In any case, this is moot. The lawsuit will most likely fail, because there is simply no EVIDENCE that Apple and the Big Six publishers colluded to fix prices: innuendo and conspiracy theories aren't evidence. Now something may turn up in the discovery process as the lawsuit goes forward, but if nothing does, then the case will be dismissed. That's the likely result, by at least 4 to 1.
Now this doesn't mean that I am happy with publisher pricing: they definitely need to be more flexible on their pricing. But in the long term, we are better off with lots of players with the ability to set pricing, rather than one BIG player, who can lower prices short term, then jack them up long term.