Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Apple and the price fix six screwed the little guys who had a very nice way of doing business.
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The timeline doesn't support that narrative. A good portion of the little guys had already gone belly up before Apple entered the ebook business. When Apple was looking to come into the ebook store business, Amazon had 80% of the ebook market in the US, so if you want to point fingers, point them there. Pretty hard to run someone out of the market when you aren't even in the market and just as hard to run people out of business when you have less that 20 percent of the market at your peak.
The bottom line is that Amazon was very aggressive in the ebook market at that point, investing in an infrastructure that no one else in the business was close to matching. They were aggressively selling name ebooks under cost to capture market share. That, in addition to creating an infrastructure that made it very easy to buy ebooks and have them automatically download on the the kindle readers even if you didn't have wifi (their whispernet), and building the biggest inventory of ebooks by far was very hard to beat.
Apple probably had the cash and marketing muscle to compete with them, but the anti-trust suit made them decide that the fix was in and it just wasn't worth the effort, thus there is little competition. The fact that Amazon quickly caved on agency pricing after the competition had dried up, showed that it was all about market share. Lack of competition is a bad thing for the consumer.