Quote:
Originally Posted by curtw
Yes, that's exactly what agency pricing was intended to accomplish: stop Amazon from selling books at a loss in an attempt to drive the rest of the ebook sellers out of the market.
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Except that when the feds looked at Amazon's books, they found they were *not* losing money selling ebooks.
Can we *finally* put that myth to rest?
Amazon had ebook sales that temporarily dropped prices on *some* ebooks. They made their money back on other *ebooks*, not on TVs or DVDs or other merchandise.
They made a *profit* pre-agency and they are making a way bigger profit now because Agency crippled indie ebookstores, killed most of the hardware-only ereader vendors, and helped mainstreamed indie publishing.
The only winners from agency were Apple and Amazon.
And Apple's "win" is being debated in court.
"Don't throw me into the briar patch!"
Edit:
1- The trial is about a conspiracy to raise prices via Agency, not about Agency or the prices. Just the act of conspiring to raise the prices triggers the law.
2- Claiming they were trying to prevent Amazon from dominating the industry is, as the Judge already ruled, a non sequitor. Intentions, good or bad, are no justification for breaking the law.
3- To add insult to injury, Apple's "excuses" neglect that Amazon has today at least the same market share they had before the conspiracy. The losers, besides consumers, were the smaller indie ebookstores that lost access to BPH titles for months on end right as ebook adoption was exploding. Apple's gains didn't come from Amazon, they came from Nook, from Fictionwise, from Books On Board, from Sony, from other ebookstors.