Quote:
Originally Posted by oilyfan
I believe the publishers wanted to do this because they want to continue selling books through the traditional channels, the bricks and mortal stores such as Barnes and Noble and Chapters. Amazon pricing e-books at $9.99 was undercutting the bricks and mortar stores prices.
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Specifically Amazon was selling best-selling new releases at $9.99 or less, even though they were losing money on them, in order to get people to buy Kindles. This was eating into the sales of hardcover bestsellers, which is where the publishers make most of their money. Amazon was also well on the way to getting a near-monopoly on ebooks using a proprietary format that basically would lock readers into Amazon for the long-term (since switching to a different device like a Kobo or Sony in the future would render an existing ebook library purchased from Amazon unreadable without illegally removing DRM and converting the format) and the publishers were scared about one company with a history of very aggressive business practices basically having a monopoly on book sales. Their response was to collude with Apple to set up the current pricing scheme.