Man, y'all crack me up.
It's utterly vile for the publisher to determine the price, because it should be up to the retailer. When the retailer slashes the price, it's also utterly vile because... the self-publisher ought to control the price.
The author didn't read the fine print. And part of the price you pay, as an independent author using a self-publishing service like KDP, is that -- as Hines points out on his own blog -- you are on your own. You don't have a big publisher backing you up and yanking the retailer back in line; you don't have a publisher's lawyer combing through the agreement for the gotchas. And no, you can't trust Amazon's or Apple's anything to work flawlessly and in the author's interest.
(For those hoping to reach humans, just keep in mind that Apple uses human screening for its apps, which results in backlogs and arbitrary -- and not necessarily arbitrary -- rejections of content.)
Also, people 'round here are quite fond of touting the benefits of disintermediation and ditching the publishers -- without recognizing that this is just shifting power away from publishers and towards Amazon, Apple and whatever handful book retailers will be left standing. We're going to see a lot more of these kinds of incidents as self-publishing gains steam.
On balance, will it be worth it? Beats me. I guess we'll find out soon enough.
