Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
I always upgrade to the latest OS. I don't care enough about liberating iBooks to change this. I agree that it's nice to have competition. I was one who could never understand why so many folks on here favored Amazon in their fight with the publishers. When Apple lost, it took away competition.
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The lawsuit took years to resolve. By then it was clear that there would never again be competition on basis of price, as publisher contracts that were drawn in the interim, for the most part, preclude it, and are no longer subject to the price-fixing issues present when the lawsuit was initiated. So while Apple lost the lawsuit, Amazon lost the ability to set prices. The principle of competition lost out.
Even if you are self-publishing on both Apple and Amazon, terms of service for both insist on price matching, even though the respective services are not equivalent in features and so forth.
Competition is now on basis of service and ecosystem features. Amazon seems to be winning at that, and it seems irrefutable that they give their ecosystem more attention than anybody.
Ideally consumers could legally migrate ebook purchases to the ecosystem of their choice in a convenient way, maybe using blockchain technology. But there is no current business incentive that would drive this innovation.