[Sydney's Mom]

There is a lot of discussion about the fear of Amazon obtaining a monopoly in ebooks. But monopolies are only an issue when there is a limited amount of the product, or there are high barriers to entry. Even if Amazon had 99% of the market in ebooks, anyone could open up an ebook store at minimal cost. So Turow's argument about the appearance of competition reads nice, but the issue is more nuanced than that.

The issue of predatory pricing is the same. This would have been a great argument against Target to save the independent book store. But I think the law would let the market work in the case of ebooks, and the Agency agreement is precisly about NOT letting the market work.

Why the publishers didn't study the music industry more closely puzzles me. I guess they thought Apple, which destroyed the CD, would be their savior. The problem is Apple came out with the ipod, so we went along with Apple being the sole source (for awhile) for music. But Amazon had the ipod (kindle) in this episode.