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Originally Posted by curtw
That "handful" was all New York Times bestsellers. The number of titles might have been a small fraction of available ebooks, but they did represent a significant plurality of all of Amazon's sales.
I own an Amazon device. We have a Prime account. I'm not against them, but they were well on their way to establishing a monopoly in this market. And because legal action wouldn't have been feasible until *after* the monopoly was established, Apple and others took this approach. It was a bad approach, but obviously the PR angle wasn't working.
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Publishers had an easy way to stop Amazon from getting market control: Stop selling to Amazon. Or give other ebook stores--like Fictionwise, BoB, Diesel, AllRomanceEbooks--good enough terms to let them solidly compete, instead of picking a method that drove smaller stores out of business in the aftermath of the new pricing scheme.
The publishers are the supplier. If they don't like a retailer's action, they have *absolute* control over that retailer's success... they can pull their products.
This wasn't about "preventing a monopoly;" it was about "getting all the money we can from Amazon *and* controlling public opinion at the same time." And they picked an illegal method to accomplish that, and they got caught and slapped down for it.