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Originally Posted by leebase
The very fact the the publishers HATED Amazon's pricing but were POWERLESS to do anything about it is proof positive that Amazon had monopoly power.
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The term is "monopsony," not "monopoly." (Single-outlet, rather than single-source.)
And publishers were not powerless. They could've left. They could've sold books to other places at a discount They could've supported other ebookstores, pushed for non-DRM ebooks to allow customers to switch from Kindle to Sony to Nook to Kobo and not care about what store they bought at.
They could start promoting themselves as a brand, teaching the public to associate certain kinds of books with certain publishers. Right now, genre readers are familiar with publishers but "mainstream/lit" readers often aren't--and that's because those publishers have always ignored readers; readers aren't their customers.
All publishers had to do to break Amazon was change their focus from "distributor = customer" to "reader = customer;" from that point, there were hundreds of ways they could shift their business practices to not be locked into Amazon.
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It is apparent that the publishers did collude though I agree with Apple that Apple did not. The judge decided that Apple is guilty because Apple's actions allowed the publishers colluding to succeed.
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Apple wanted its ibookstore; it coordinated the efforts and negotiations. The publishers didn't come to Apple and say, "so, give us this agency pricing deal;" Apple offered it, and helped them sort out how to force it on other retailers.
Apple, I expect, wanted the clickthrough accounting system more than anything else--they didn't want to have to sort out different books' wholesale-vs-retail pricing, didn't want to deal with bargains and how that changed the numbers. Wanted a simple percentage and no hassles--but knew that couldn't compete with other bookstores.