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Originally Posted by pwalker8
No, I haven't because they were not accused of price fixing. The publishers were accused of agreeing to hold the line on agency pricing and Apple is accused of conspiring with them.
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It must have been some sort of accident then, that all those new releases went in lockstep to specific price points.
Agency was used as the vehicle for price-fixing. That is why Agency was a bad thing -- because, like you are so fond of pointing out, agency itself is not illegal, conspiracy to fix prices is.
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No, I haven't agreed that Apple and the publishers drove smaller eBook stores out of business. For one thing, Fictionwise was bought out _before_ Apple got in the ebook business and before the publishers got Amazon to agree to agency pricing. I find it very unlikely that Apple, the # 3 ebook store behind Amazon and B&N (who bought Fictionwise) drove anyone out of business. It's a lot more likely that if anyone drove them out of business, it was Amazon with their loss leader pricing.
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Apple struck a blow to the business strategy of small bookstores. Amazon and B&N did not.
What on earth possesses you to think the #3 ebook store cannot destroy #'s 4-9999 simply because #1 & #2 are bigger than #3?
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My personal belief is that those companies went out of business and Sony pulled out of the ebook store business as part of the normal course of the definition of the ebook market. The creative destruction involved in the free market occurs in pretty much every line of business. According to the Small Business Association, 8 out of 10 new businesses fail in their first three years. I don't know why people seem to think that ebook stores are somehow magically exempt from those hard facts.
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That is certainly one possibility, but it doesn't fit all the facts of this particular case.
The small ebookstores were doing fairly well until agency, then suddenly they all failed at more or less the same time.