Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
I did read the dissent. I do wonder if you have read the majority, which by the way represents the actual decision of the Court. The majority comprehensively addresses and debunks the dissent.
What you attempted to imply is essentially that because not all titles are discounted and competitors tend to match prices that there is no competition on price or at least that it is not important. What happened to prices after agency is a good indication of the actual effect price competition was having.
Are you claiming that agency did not in fact lead to increased prices?
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Apparently you didn't read it carefully since the difference between the majority opinion and the dissent are a classic example of the two schools of thought on anti-trust in the US. As far as debunks, well you can arm wave all you want, but when one company has 90% of the market and another company enters the market, then that increases competition.
If 5 percent of the titles are discounted by Amazon and 95 percent are not, then it's hard to claim there is real price competition, unless you cherry pick the 5 percent and ignore the rest (which is what Amazon's expert did).
Yep, I do indeed claim that agency did not lead to increased prices for the vast majority of books. Prices of specific books have drifted towards what people are willing to pay, which is how a market works.
I picked up some Jeff Shaara books a few weeks ago. The prices ranged from $5 (suggested paperback price $18.00) up to $10 (suggested paperback price $18.00). Pre agency, the so called sweet spot price that Amazon was charging was $10 with the vast majority of books costing about the same as the current paper price (either hardback or paper). In general, right now, the ebook price is at a slight discount to the current paper price (example Jim Butcher's most recent book which came out in June is $14.99 for the ebook and $20 for the hardback (list price $28.00)). Butcher's first book, Storm Front, is $2.99 for the ebook and $7.99 for the mass market paperback.
Those are just the examples that I first thought of simply because I bought those books recently. Do you have an actual survey that examines ebook prices that shows that ebook prices have gone up, or is this simply a "everyone knows that agency drove prices up so no need to validate the assertion" thing?
I mean a real one, not the flawed one put out by the prosecutor in the Apple case.
I have been buying a large number of ebooks each year since 1999 when Baen's ebook bundles started and also started buying ebooks from the Sony store in 2006 a year before the Kindle came about and been buying from the Kindle store since 2007. I have a pretty good idea what I've paid for the various books. Even in the pre-agency days, most of the ebooks that I bought tended not to be discounted. I know this because when the brouhaha about agency was at it's high point back in 2012, I went back and charted what I had paid for the various books. I even posted a summary of it at the time.