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Originally Posted by murraypaul
It is about preserving price.
Lets not kid ourselves about anything else.
The publishers are concerned that without multiple viable retailers, they cannot maintain their pricing levels.
They are concerned about competition only in as much as it is required to maintain pricing.
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Its maybe not just about price, but specifically about margins. In the Amazon vs IPG dispute, IPG characterized it thusly:
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"Amazon.com is putting pressure on publishers and distributors to change their terms for electronic and print books to be more favorable toward Amazon. Our electronic book agreement recently came up for renewal, and Amazon took the opportunity to propose new terms for electronic and print purchases that would have substantially changed your revenue from the sale of both. It's obvious that publishers can't continue to agree to terms that increasingly reduce already narrow margins. I have spoken directly with many of our clients and every one of them agrees that we need to hold firm with the terms we now offer. I'm not sure what has changed at Amazon over the last few months that they now find it unacceptable to buy from IPG at terms that are acceptable to our other customers." Suchomel reiterated to us that the company's terms of sale for ebooks have not changed.
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LINK
I might point out that the interests of authors are also implicated in these disputes, as I indicated above. When the IPG president refers to "clients", he means "authors". Its why the Authors Guild opposes the DOJ action.