My point with the parenthetical note is that Amazon is not acting in a consistent manner. With music, they trumpeted the virtues of going DRM-free and allowing

My point with the parenthetical note is that Amazon is not acting in a consistent manner. With music, they trumpeted the virtues of going DRM-free and allowing for dynamic pricing, while with books, they're sticking to DRM and not allowing dynamic pricing. As for price-fixing, if there were multiple vendors for e-books on Kindle readers, then yes, I would agree that Amazon is not at all price-fixing. Since they are, however, the sole provider of e-books for the Kindle (more or less-- you can convert other formats to Mobipocket with mixed results, and the Kindle 2 and DX versions have limited PDF support), their insistence on uniform e-book prices can reasonably be seen as a kind of price fixing. This is part of why I opined over at Chad Orzel's blog (http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/the_amazon_kerfuffle.php http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/the_amazon_kerfuf...) that an upshot of this falling-out should be that in order to keep their platform viable, Amazon should drop DRM and support ePub or some other standard format. If they followed their own example of Amazon MP3, then they really would be consumer advocates by taking issue with Macmillan.