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Originally Posted by darryl
It is admittedly somewhat unusual, but I find I agree with several of your points. I agree Agency Pricing is not price fixing per se. Nor is it inherently evil. I agree that the Publishers have never admitted to price fixing, at least not formally and explicitly. And the DOJ's complaint was not about price-fixing per se.
However, what happened was worse than price fixing. They conspired to take control of retail pricing from the retailer, for the purpose of eliminating retail competion. The retailer had always had control of retail prices previously. Proof that they can in fact embrace change in the right circumstances. And although they never admitted or were convicted, as you put it, of price fixing per se, price fixing is what occurred. You may recall that the Apple "contracts" set pricing tiers and effectively prevented any discounting. Applying your amateur definition of price fixing above it is difficult to see how this behaviour escapes it. Prices did go up. Discounting stopped. The conspirator's authors suffered, as did the book-buying public. And arguably, the evidence of the activities of various publishing executives and Apple personnel, right up to Steve Jobs, effectively amounts to an admission.
Agency Pricing is not price fixing per se. But Price Fixing there was in its first publishing industry incarnation. In this, its second incarnation, this time achieved by negotiation, we have not been privy to the thoughts or correspondence of the various parties including executives involved. We are not even privy to the contracts between Amazon and the individual cartel members. Price fixing cannot be proved. But I strongly suspect it, with I think very good reason. Perhaps it is time that some of the Pro-Publishing Pollyanna's removed their rose coloured glasses and acknowledged some fairly obvious facts. But I won't be holding my breath.
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No, it's somewhat more complex than that. Apple's contract had what is called a most favored nation clause, which said that the publishers could not charge less somewhere else than they did at Apple. They were and are quite free to discount prices as much as they want. Indeed, they do discount prices on a regular basis. I purchased David McCullough's "The Wright Brothers" from the Amazon Kindle store for $14.99, which is a 50% discount from the list price and $3 less than the hardback price. There is even a great big "This price was set by the publisher" on the page.
Much of the publishers' angst and desire to control price comes from the fact that Amazon has a monopolistic position when it comes to ebooks. The publishers really want to have alternate sales channels and not to worry about being held hostage by Amazon.
The real issue is that the true narrative isn't all that straight forward and certainly isn't "Sainted Amazon and Evil Publishers". Both sides are large corporations that play hard ball. Amazon wants to squeeze the suppliers (i.e. publishers) just like Walmart, while the publishers want to maintain their current business model. Neither is particularly concerned about the people who buy the individual books to read.