[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

What's misleading about the whole agency pricing debate is that the issue for most posters here is not that the publishers acted illegally, rather it's that they acted to raise prices. It's the price raising, not the price fixing that's the problem.

It's the price fixing *for* price raising that's the problem. While it would also be illegal for them to get together and agree to undercut all other publishers for a period of five years to clear out the competition, and that would also get outcry, it'd be of a different type.

Lets review. It is legal and appropriate for Apple to suggest that the publishers adopt an agency pricing model for ebooks. [...]

It is legal and appropriate for publishers to adopt the agency pricing model if they feel its a better model for them.

It is not legal to coordinate their efforts among companies who should be competing with each other, agreeing to set aside their competition in order to raise prices across the industry.

Could they independently adopt the agency model, watch the first company to do so raise prices, and say, "well, if they're getting away with that, I'll set my prices there too?" Sure. BUT THEY DIDN'T. No one company decided to take the risk of a new business model, one with lower payment to publishers (and therefore lower royalties to authors) that involved higher consumer prices... instead, they decided to all do it together, because none of them believed they could be successful at it alone.

There is evidence that the publishers acted together in moving to adopt the agency model. Again, that's legal. The publishers conduct only becomes illegal if they act together to raise prices. *If they raise prices independently, based on what their market research tells them, thats legal.*

Yep. But there's clear *public* evidence that the publishers were unhappy, not with their income, but with *public perception* of ebook prices (the concept that bestsellers "should be" $10), and coordinated efforts to force higher prices on the consumers. That they weren't doing this "because it's a more profitable business model," but because they wanted to punish readers who believed $10 was the most reasonable price for a new ebook.

There are actions companies are allowed to take if they don't like their customers' attitudes toward their products; "conspire with competitors to convince those customers the error of their ways" is not one of them.

And if the publishers were really concerned about Amazon's market dominance, all they had to do was stop selling through Amazon. They could do that all at once, or by specific categories... only sell their SF through B&N, or only sell their YA novels through BooksonBoard, or offer incentives to start-up bookstores who want to compete with Amazon. No law required them to sell to Amazon at all.