Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
It may already be too late for DRM-free to help.
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I concur, I think it'd help them even less than it helped the record companies. The market moved faster on eBooks than it did digital music, and the BPHs handled the change even worse than the record companies did. Which is kind of impressive in a train wreck sort of way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by whismerhill
exactly ! 
that's why I thought that "maybe" the governments should do something about it, and put back the price in the retailer's hands. (note the *maybe*. a lot would have to be discussed. And in any case it doesn't belong to us to decide such matters ...) |
Unfortunately for consumers, agency pricing by itself isn't illegal so the government can't do anything. The reason the government stepped in with Apple and the BPHs was because they colluded together to fix prices. It was basically a conspiracy not only to force agency pricing on the entire market, but to force set prices on the entire market. If they had simply waited till their contracts expired and refused to accept anything but agency pricing in the new ones,
without working together to do so, it would have been perfectly legal. And that's what they did.
I really don't think it's working out for them, but at least they didn't do it illegally this time around.