People said the same thing about Wal-Mart, except somehow Target spanks their a** every quarter.
The biggest difference here being that Amazon has already knocked out much of their competition, it was quick and brutal. I said that already, but you chose to ignore it because you're suffering from tunnel vision, too. Oh and wait, Walmart did the same thing to many businesses already, and saying Target spanks their ass every quarter when Target's net income is 1/5th of Walmart's is not just hyperbole it is an outright lie. For investors, Target might be great because there are far fewer shares and therefore a greater increase in value for them despite the company making less, but that doesn't translate in any way shape or form to Target spanking their ass every quarter. In fact, their growth per share is extremely close, too, suggesting Walmart's dominance is going nowhere.
Either way, your supposition has a few problems, notably Amazon, unlike Apple, still sells the physical copies of the books, as well as the e-books. Said physical copies are NOT covered by the Apple agreement and Amazon is free to price them as it wishes.
I don't understand what you're getting at with this, it doesn't have any relevance beyond showing that Amazon's price gouging occurred on physical books as well, which is largely why physical book stores couldn't survive, EBooks alone wouldn't have done the damage so quickly.
Amazon, as a part of their business, allows other retailers to compete with them ON THE SAME PAGE. You can see other prices for both new and used books, right there next to Amazon's price.
Yes, part of Amazon's business model is to allow other retailers to list their items on Amazon's page, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. So while this does make it easier for users to find a better price as opposed to typing a product description into Google, it also gives Amazon a cut of the profits whenever someone does beat their price. It's fair, but the way you put it makes it seem as if Amazon did it because they were being nice, when they actually did it because it's better for their business. If you didn't figure it out already, when you're willing to take a loss selling products just to make sure you sell them instead of someone else, it actually makes life easier to have your competitors report all of their prices to you, even if the tradeoff is you show customers what it costs elsewhere. It's a game Amazon plays and usually wins, it's a rare thing that I see something sold by Amazon being sold cheaper by someone else through their site, and as I said before I actually like and use the Amazon store.
Regardless of the price Amazon chooses to sell their physical books for, THE PUBLISHER WAS PAID! They got their money, upfront. Amazon could give paperbacks away for free and put a dollar in your pocket for taking it and it would not effect the publishers at all.
Again, I'm wondering why this is relevant. The publishers always get paid. Except in the case of used books, but that's not what we're discussing. I never said they weren't paying publishers, I said publishers weren't happy with Amazon's pricing scheme, which has been made clear since these accusations began. If any of this was about making publishers happy, nobody would question Apple since it's clear the publishers wanted to go that route. As for not effecting the publishers at all, maybe knocking out the distribution methods they've used for years had an effect. I haven't looked at their numbers, but is it really crazy to think that maybe they'd have made more money if book stores were still around, too?
Lastly, it is not illegal to have a monopoly, but it IS illegal to abuse it. If some fabled day came in the future where Amazon used their control of the market to force publishers to charge less, then they are free to take them to court over it or seek a government investigation.
There are more ways to abuse a monopoly than force publishers to charge less. In fact, I don't even see that as a reasonable possibility, it'd be more likely to go the other way and just charge customers more. That said, Amazon has yet to achieve monopoly status, one might argue that Apple's deal with publishers is a part of why. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that if they had gained total control of the market they wouldn't have abused it. In the beginning, nobody would've expected Microsoft to gain and abuse their monopoly, then they did. It may not have gone this way with Amazon, but all that we know does show us that Amazon was willing to take a loss to knock off their competition and move towards a monopoly. If you have a better reason to sell products at a loss aside from gaining control of the market, please enlighten me, I'm not trying to be an a-hole about it, just realistic.
Let's be perfectly clear here as well. This deal was never about Apple helping out publishers either. The sales of ebooks through Apple is a rounding error on their balance sheet, they were worried about a visible chink in their 30% cut of sales through iTunes and they didn't want to have to manage an actual competing store front for books. Apple isn't a book seller, they just wanted the smoothest method they could get to a) offer books, which people wanted on their iDevices, and b) get 30% off the top of that.
I don't think anyone is arguing against this. Apple, as any business does, negotiated a deal that benefits them. This arrangement apparently worked well for publishers, as well, or they wouldn't have gone for it. You can argue that they don't deserve the 30% if you want, but that has nothing to do with this. So yet again, I'm wondering about the relevance.
It was either buy books at wholesale, setup a division to manage prices and take a loss like Amazon, or collude to change how the market was structured. Guess which one they picked.
Except those aren't the only options. The option you left out is they told publishers they don't agree with Amazon's pricing model and wanted to use this one, and publishers agreed and signed agreements with apple. What you're doing is exactly what everyone else is doing and it's why I posted in defense of Apple to begin with. We don't actually know if Apple told publishers they need to do anything in particular in regards to their dealings with Amazon, only that they stated they don't feel Amazon's pricing model was sustainable. That fact alone does not constitute collusion. It may have been immoral, but that does not make it illegal. I said all of this above, but you chose to ignore it and instead (poorly) address one small part of my post regarding Amazon's own actions. The two points I was trying to convey were these: Amazon isn't some weak victim to Apple's bullying as they are both large companies who do immoral things, and this constant repeating of "Apple's contract has this clause" is, until we actually see the contract, nothing but an assumption made to portray Apple as being guilty before trial.
Let me sum things up for you. I pointed out that the "contract clause" everyone keeps referring to as evidence isn't actually evidence, it isn't known to exist yet and that's what the case is about. I then went on to say Apple is being treated like a bully, despite Amazon's own actions that have already knocked out competition (unlike Apple's actions) and I think that while they clearly did something immoral, they deserve a fair shake legally speaking. So I pointed out that both companies have done some evil things, the question is whether Apple has actually broken the law or not. You then proceeded to make a bad (outright false) comparison followed by a whole slew of irrelevant information, drawing the conclusion that Apple must be guilty, despite not actually presenting any information at all that's related to the case. Now, I've dissected your entire post and responded to every bit of it with relevant information and ACTUAL facts. Congratulations! You, sir, have successfully kept me entertained with your ignorance on this rainy day. But you did nothing else.
