Quote:
Originally Posted by ilovejedd
Actually, I do believe there's no law against it in the US, either. The issue here is that the publishers colluded with each other to fix prices. If they had independently decided to sell ebooks at fixed prices there wouldn't be a lawsuit right now.
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There are several problems. Several areas.
One is the publishers getting together to decide on how much they are going to sell items (anything) for. That is the old anti-trust problem. Collusion. Anti-competitiveness.
Two oil company CEOs going golfing on Sunday and deciding what the price of gas at the the pumps is going to be on Monday is the usual example.
Second is the publishers saying that Amazon or anyone else can't sell a book for 9.99 even if Amazon loses money because it cost 14.99 to buy the book directly (retail) from the publisher. (Actually Amazon probably didn't lose money because the wholesale price was about 9.99) The problem for the publishers was essentially many fold.
1. The independent books stores couldn't compete on price.
2. People became used to books being priced at 9.99 and becoming reluctant to pay a larger amount.
3. Amazon and other online giants get bigger and bigger and the publishers just become book printers and binders for the paper books.
4. The eBook pricing becomes less and less connected to the paper book pricing.
[[The publishers have worried about this from day one because they don't want this obvious idea to become rooted in the public mind.]]