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Originally Posted by rhadin
My understanding was that the agency price was the lowest price that a retailer could sell it for but that a retailer could sell it for a higher price. The idea was to prevent discounting. Otherwise, why would there be a clause in the agreement with Apple that no price would be lower than Apple's price?
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Amazon had with the previous model a similar clause.
From
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...9-ebooks.html:
Quote:
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Amazon screwed with this model when they brought out the Kindle: the contracts they pushed at the publishers defined Amazon as being a publisher, who would license subsidiary rights from the original publisher and republic the books via Kindle. This enabled Amazon to add onerous and arguably anticompetitive contractual terms to their contracts because they weren't simply acting as consignment wholesalers, but as licensees: notably, requiring publishers not to sell ebooks for a lower price elsewhere than Amazon were selling them via their store, and allowing Amazon to pick a price point, sell at that price point, and only pay the publisher a percentage royalty, rather than a fixed discount off a (publisher-set) SRP.
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