@Steve. Thanks for your post. I will accept "what the market will bear" for the purposes of this discussion. And say that this is the main reason why we like to see competion in an industry, and for the existence of a substantial body of law including anti-trust law. What the market will bear does not work very well when we have a monopoly, or in this case an oligopoly. All but one of the major players colluded with Apple in an unlawful conspiracy to eliminate competition at the retail level. Despite the result in Court, they did in fact succeed. We currently have no competion at the retail level, at least so far as books from the large traditional publishers are concerned.
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