Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
A manifestly ridiculous statement. The Oxford dictionary defines competition as "The activity or condition of striving to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others." Stores simply selling the same product simply doesn't qualify.
Actually that's one reason why the Publishers wanted no competition. But they now have it for the first time in many years. From Indies. These competition loving dinosaurs for some reason agreed with Apple, as the Appeals court wrote, "....... to raise consumer‐facing ebook prices by eliminating retail price competition."*
A longer quote from the Appeals Court is in order.
Think about your last sentence. The phrase hoist on your own petard comes to mind. Clearly Amazon was competing on price by discounting the ebooks available in its infrastructure.
I'll finish this post with another relevant quote from the Court.
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It's kind of amazing how many fixate on a narrative without actually remembering the facts. Amazon only sold a small group of ebooks at a specific discounted price point. The vast majority of the ebooks were not discounted, but where at the basic price. That's true even now with hard back books. For example, the hard back price for Indianapolis at Amazon is $16.80 (Kindle price is $14.99). The same hard back at the B&N store is $16.80.
The reason for that makes perfect sense if you stop and think of how businesses work rather than let your emotions get in the way. In general, the publishers sell the same book to each of the book stores at the same basic price. So price difference comes down to how much more an individual book store wants to charge for that specific book. Most businesses will match prices of their major competitors. This is true in quite a few different businesses.
Thus prices tend to drift down to the lowest sustainable price point when there is competition, though this tends to play out when a new competitor comes into a market and makes a push trying to get market share. You see it in quite a few businesses such as books, electronics, even air travel. Of course, businesses have sales of select items, but in general, they keep a very close eye on what their competitors charge for things.
This is what I mean by companies not competing on price. For the most part, over time competitors tend to charge the same price for the same piece of merchandise. It's just different pieces of merchandise are at different price points.