Quote:
Originally Posted by robko
Ya, I haven't quite figured out how the start of agency pricing (which legal or not Apple had a big hand in starting) REDUCED prices which Apple claims to have done.
And since e-books themselves haven't changed much in the last while, what innovation did they push? You could easily argue Kobo and B&N caused a lot more innovation related to ebooks (since the hardware side has changed).
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The discussion about the change in prices depends on the segment of books in question. The prices for bestsellers were increased, but readers turned to indie books which are cheaper so while the average price of a bestseller went up, the average price being paid if you consider all the books, not just bestsellers went down.
The supposed point for the this whole maneuver was to limit Amazon's market share, but it came out on top anyway because 1) it distributes both indie books and bestsellers so a shift in readers' choice doesn't matter, 2) it got viewed as a fighter for consumer rights 3) it went from using ebooks as loss leaders to using ereaders as loss leaders.
Aside from the legal impacts the publishers lost 1) revenue both because of lower profit margins and loss of sales and 2) importance because they used to be the gatekeepers but readers got to see that some of the books that didn't match the quality threshold of publishers matched the quality threshold of publishers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alanHd
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
From a neutral point of view it makes me wonder what apple is trying to stop coming out.
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I don't think that they are trying to stop something from coming out, I think that they consider themselves to be above the law. The judge was very lenient with them and despite being convinced by the evidence that Apple broke the law she didn't even want to appoint a monitor and was singing Apple's praises. That ruling only came to be because Apple didn't show any intention to be antitrust compliant and even this judge couldn't ignore that.