Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
My impression is that it would lower ebook revenue, but their goal was to raise ebook prices so people would be less inclined to switch from hardcover purchases to ebooks, since hardcovers pay for most if not all of the upfront costs of putting out a book. I believe Amazon's ebook business was profitable, even if they were using the NY Times best seller list as a loss leader to entice people to buy Kindles, and that the Department of Justice had already investigated them and didn't find anything actionable before the publishers and Apple teamed up.
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As I recall from the time, the issue was that the publishers thought that Amazon was setting a price point ($10 for brand new NYT best sellers) in the mind of the consumers that the publishers didn't like. I don't think that publishers really cared all that much what format people bought books at, as long as it was at the "proper" price point.
The basic price model for publishers for a long time has been hardback, followed by paper about a year later. The hard back was roughly 3 times what the paper cost. Amazon was basically breaking that price model by setting the price point of ebooks at initial release as slightly less than double the paper back price point.
Just looking at some of the pricing threads here show a certain level of accuracy to their concerns. Even ignoring the "I just want everything to be free" crowd, few here seem to think that an ebook should have the same price point as a hard back. A majority seem to think that it should be less than a paper back, even if it's released at the same time as the hard back.