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Originally Posted by Barcey
As a consumer do you want a market place where all the goods you buy have the price set by the manufacturer? If you want to buy a new Ford Mustang it doesn't matter what dealer you go to it costs the same price?
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When it comes to an item that costs $10-20, I could care less who's setting the price. Why should I?
And if the publishers had adopted the $10 price point, you probably wouldn't have cared much either.
I do concur that agency pricing has one major disadvantage, which is that retailers will apparently have minimal options to discount books or engage in loss-leader practices. So, I'll just wait a few extra months on occasion, unless I really want a book fast. I suspect I'll survive, as will all the other people who proclaim "I have tons of unread books and won't buy ebooks ever again."
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Originally Posted by Barcey
The copyright laws give the author and publisher a temporary monopoly on selling a specific book. Now the publishers are using the monopoly to fix the price of that specific book. I've decided not to buy books from those publishers.
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Again, publishers are not "monopolists" and are not engaged in anti-competitive practices. You don't have one publisher that has a 90% market share (as Microsoft does with operating systems, for example).
If you're upset by $15 new ebooks, that's one thing. But it is simply incorrect to conflate this with a specific set of anti-competitive practices based on a semantic similarity.