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Originally Posted by leebase
Or...if we open the book to the earlier chapter....
FIRST act of aggression was AMAZON putting the ENTIRE NYT Best Sellers list on sale for $9.99 when the going rate was $25 to $30 for a hard back.
Amazon did this to prop up the sales of their $500 ebook reader.
Publishers did not want $9.99 to become the "new book price". There IS NO REASON books cost $25 to $30 in hard back form. It's simply a cost the market would bear.
Cheaper paper back books cost less, NOT HAVING ANYTHING TO DO WITH REDUCED PRODUCTION COST -- but merely as a way to sell books to people who couldn't afford the hard back book.
The hard back book is the only version sold at first so -- while a book is in it's highest demand form, it's at it's most profitable price.
Amazon was threatening the very heart of the profits of the publishers.
Amazon was SO POWERFUL that individual publishers feared taking them on by themselves. They were ALL angry about the situation.
Without Apple, ebooks would have become time windowed -- just like the paper back version.
Apple got mixed up in this ALREADY ONGOING TUG OF WAR. But Apple certainly did NOT create this problem -- AMAZON DID.
Apple with it's impending iPad device was the very thing the publishers thought could take on Amazon's stranglehold. Apple, didn't intend for one moment to go into the "sell ebooks at a loss" business.
Apple and the publishers had to pay a big fine. But -- there were only EVER going to be 2 possible outcomes. Time window ebooks, or let the publishers set the prices for ebooks...thus Amazon and all sellers became "agents" not "retailers" with respect to ebooks.
You can thank AMAZON for this.
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Amazon was engaging in legal price competition, a concept then largely foreign to the Industry. Apple and the Publishers concerned were engaging in illegal collusion.