Just to clarify, Amazon made a profit when considering each publisher's offerings independently.
From Mike Shatzkin's blog:
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8. “Loss-leading” sales were addressed by Justice in a very creative way. They are banned, not on a “per-sale” basis, but rather on a “aggregate” basis. So retailers can give away ebooks. Heck, they can pay customers to take some ebooks, as long as they make back the margin they shed on other ebook sales from the same publisher. Since Amazon has never done anything else (they told me very clearly, and not under NDA, two years ago that they discount a small percentage of the total titles that constitute a big minority slice of total sales and their overall ebook sales deliver positive margin) and nobody else could afford to, that’s a restriction without any real meaning.
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http://www.idealog.com/blog/after-th...re-do-we-stand