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Originally Posted by pwalker8
Competition and price are not the same thing. Amazon went from over 90% of the market to under 70%. That's pretty much the definition of adding competition. As far as price goes, it depends. The government basically said that if you look at the books that Amazon was selling at cost or at a loss, then then price went up. Apple said that if you look at the ebook prices as a whole, prices either remained steady or went down. So, it depends on which books you were buying. The prices that I paid during that time frame stayed pretty steady. Your mileage may vary.
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I had never purchased any ebooks from Amazon prior to the introduction of agency pricing. However, I fail to see how the introduction of the closed garden retail system of Apple's benefited anyone other than Apple. If you don't own Apple hardware, you can't buy ebooks from them, if you don't own Amazon hardware, you can at least download their app and buy ebooks from them. No other retailers benefited from Apple's entry into the market, in fact, several of them went out of business after agency pricing. Amazon was not the only retailer to engage in loss leaders, and after agency pricing, it was possible to get discounted paper books cheaper through loyalty programs than it was to get the ebook. Apple likes to claim that somehow their entry in the market benefited competition, yet all I see is that they changed the retailing system from Amazon and the 7 dwarfs to Amazon and Apple and the six dwarfs, and the cost of my books went up substantially because I had been taking advantage of sales and loyalty programs.