Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
When the publishers guaranteed that the price was the same everywhere, and sold only books with DRM, the only way Amazon could ever stop being their biggest ebook retailer is if some other company comes out with a more popular ereader platform. For all the publishers' grandstanding, this was never about the Amazon ebook monopoly, it was about the fear that discounted ebooks would cannibalize their hardcover sales, which is where they make the most profits. By controlling (and raising) the ebook price, they could slow the adoption of ebooks and preserve the hardcover profits.
Apple, on the other hand, was in it to ensure that they didn't have to discount ebooks in order to compete with Amazon.
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Yup.
All the talk about Amazon being behind the DOJ antitrust case is silly; Amazon benefited from the elimination of the smaller bookstores and the bigger hardware vendors as well as the shift to indie ebooks. The high BPH ebook prices made indie ebooks respectable and desirable and Amazon is stronger in the indie world than any of their competitors.
The longer the fix lasted, the stronger Amazon got and the weaker the non-Apple competition got. An Amazon/Apple duopoly suits Amazon just fine because iBooks only runs Apple hardware.