Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Given that Amazon controlled the vast majority of the market, I think you mean Amazon's most favored clause. Apple isn't and never was the competition for the small sites, Amazon was....
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I think you are completely misunderstanding the issue, which was not one of market share, but of price fixing.
Amazon had and still has the majority of the ebook market.
But I will repeat, again: Amazon did not deeply discount across the board with the aim of dumping ebooks until it ran its competitors out of business. Amazon deeply discounted a select number of titles, generally those on the bestseller list, while it was often undercut, sometimes significantly, by smaller etailers for less popular titles, such as the Updike books I mentioned.
What Apple did was something completely different: It colluded with the largest publishers to fix a floor for ebook prices. With such a floor, small etailers could not discount bellow what Apple (or, effectively, everyone else) charged for a title. So most of them went out of business.
Apple does not like competing on price. As we see, Apple does not like "freemium," either. So, if Apple wants to enter a market where it has competitors competing on terms it does not deem profitable enough for its model, Apple uses its considerable weight to distort the market and change the terms to ones it likes, so that it can gain the market share it wants.
What Apple does is illegal in most advanced countries, but because there are no criminal penalties against individual officers, Apple considers whatever nominal (relative term) fines its shareholders will end up paying in the future, part of the cost of getting what it wants.