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Originally Posted by leebase
Sony did not have a huge share of the book selling business. In disputes against publishers, Amazon was known to pull ALL of a publisher's book from sale.
Monopoly isn't the useful term. Able to prevent free and fair competition - is a better concept.
Remember - a company isn't supposed to have to compete against itself. Amazon was using the publisher's products as loss leaders to launch its reading devices. Good for Amazon, bad for the publishers -- and frankly -- for the other book sellers who didn't have billions in VC money and inflated stock evaluations to run their businesses on.
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For those of us who remember all the way back to the opening of the iTunes store, Apple's fight with the the record companies and the record companies coming to an agreement with Amazon as a group to not use DRM when they were trying to create competition to the iTunes store, none of what happened with Amazon, the publishers or Apple was new stuff or particularly shocking.
Apple used their control of the online music market to push the pricing model they wanted. The record companies hated it and went to Amazon to get them to provide Apple some competition. Some 10 to 15 years later, Amazon wanted to use their control of the eBook market (they controlled 90% of the market at the time) to set the prices for eBooks, the publishers hated it and went to Apple to provide some competition. Basically the same stuff.
Monopoly has a somewhat different threshold legally than the common usage of the word. A lot depends on how you define the market, who makes the calls for the government and what judge you get. It's a lot more complex that the rather simplistic chant "Amazon good, publishers and Apple bad".