Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeD
Still, all that said, I think it's immaterial to the DOJ case. If publishers colluded, then it doesn't matter whether it was for the good of the ebook market or not, it's wrong, illegal and they should be held accountable for it.
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It does matter whether it was for the good of the ebook market; if they can prove (or show reasonable evidence to support) that they were preventing a collapse of the industry, or that Amazon was going to jack prices up to $18/book as soon as they'd driven BN.com and Diesel out of business, they'd have a potential excuse for raising prices for consumers.
If they can show a *benefit* for the public at large, even at the price of an extra $3-5 per book for a lot of buyers, they might get away with it. If they could show that three of them were about to go bankrupt without agency pricing, and of course the public would be poorer if three major publishers collapsed, maybe that'd be enough to excuse the price hike.
However, "convince the public that they should pay more" is not a valid reason for collusion, especially when the public statements kept saying "it's not about our profits; it's about people not paying enough, because then they don't value all our hard work."
Businesses are not allowed to break laws to get people to "value their work." And if the problem was "Amazon was dominating the industry! We needed to stop them!" the solution was simple... stop selling to Amazon, and support other retailers.