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Originally Posted by darryl
@Fbone. Thanks for the link to the BOB summary judgement. The evidence makes it abundantly clear that BOB was in fact in trouble before agency. Whilst the transition to agency did result in BOB not having access to Big 6 ebooks for some period of time, the evidence shows that within a month and a half BOB had regained access to 3 of the 6 major publishers ebooks, including Penguin, Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster. It seems that BOB presented no evidence to back up the claims that it lost 70% of its customers because of this loss of access during transition.
It also appears that BOB was a very enthusiastic supporter of agency, since it was expected to eliminate the retail price competition and would negate the "deep pockets" advantage of its large competitors. It appears that the later legal proceedings were highly speculative. Whilst the allegations made, if true, may have resulted in a large payout, no evidence was provided to support these allegations. The court summed it up as follows:
@pwalker8. Though I didn't find your timeline argument convincing, it is clear that agency was not the direct cause of the demise of either Fictionwise or BOB. In the case of BOB it appears to have played only a minor role if any. In the case of Fictionwise we can speculate that it may have played some role in B&N's decision to exclude it from future plans, though of course in the circumstances that must remain sheer speculation.
This is the first time I have actually looked into this, and I found the BOB summary judgement very interesting. I detest agency and would have preferred to find that the conspiracy was indeed to blame, so was sceptical. However, it seems that the conspiracy was little more than a convenient scapegoat in this instance.
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I've been following all this from the beginning and paid attention when various things happen. Sometimes it's hard to find the articles from 5 years ago on google now, but I generally can remember the gist of what happened.
When big companies collide, none of them have clean hands. Amazon used the government to do their dirty work and paid them well to do it. Most of the big tech companies are in the same boat. Call me cynical.
I have zero doubt that Apple knew that the five publishers were talking together. The only real question is was what Apple did against US law. I still think that it wasn't and that the case would have been overturned if Scallia not died. Either way, it's water under the bridge.
My personal feeling is that we would be in a better place now if the case had been dismissed and we had several seriously competing ebook stores forcing each other to be more responsive to consumers. Apple's ebook push now might have the effect of forcing Amazon to react and improve their store. We shall see.