[markbot]

I'm against agency pricing since it has effectively reduced competition. The distributors can no longer compete on price...as a result, ebook prices rose significantly. This has allowed some book distributors like B&N to survive, paradoxically...but this is actually inefficient and has hurt other pure ebook stores. If those distributors are too weak they should go bankrupt. Then someone more efficient has to rise to defeat Amazon later. That's how market economies work. creative destruction and chaos.

The fear is that if there were no agency pricing then Amazon would eventually dominate ebooks and thus later they could raise prices. This argument is baloney since you have effectively traded theoretical future Amazon price increases with actual price increases today via the publisher control. Plus, I don't agree that they would have the pricing power later to unilaterally raise ebook prices.

The publishers themselves could compete directly with Amazon in distribution with ebooks at sometime. There is loads of potential competition in ebooks since the distribution costs are so much lower. Amazon will dominate if they are better, and their incumbency advantage and scale are advantages but can be overcome with a better ebook store...such as one that supports epub.