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Aug 11, 2011 13:24

There's a lawsuit filed on Apple and various book publishers accusing them of "Price fixing" for setting up the Agency model that prevented Amazon from deep discounting of their books ( Read more... )

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terrycloth August 11 2011, 20:12:50 UTC
Forcing them to sell for negative money? The cost of selling an e-book is zero, so how else could it be a loss?

For it to be price fixing it has to be collusion between multiple parties (which it is if Apple and a bunch of publishers got together to raise prices).

A monopoly would mean Amazon was the only game in town. If they were actually a monopoly they'd get in trouble for trying to pressure publishers, yes -- otherwise it's just good business to try to negotiate down your wholesale price.

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barberio August 12 2011, 06:46:49 UTC
The cost of making an ebook is not zero. The cost of making a copy of an ebook is zero, but the cost of making the original from which all copies are made is substantial and counted in the hundreds of thousands.

And Amazon *were* the monopoly for straight-to-device ebook distribution.

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moxie_man August 12 2011, 09:57:58 UTC
Ah, so Amazon has become the online version of WalMart.

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barberio August 12 2011, 10:05:56 UTC
They were pretty open about it too, see what happened to Macmillan when they refused Amazon's ebook terms.

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