I did not mean to portray Amazon as some benevolent 3rd party in the industry. Amazon was most certainly milking the publishers for what they were worth but the

I did not mean to portray Amazon as some benevolent 3rd party in the industry. Amazon was most certainly milking the publishers for what they were worth but they were doing their best to ensure that the content itself stayed reasonably priced and accessible to consumers in order to curb piracy. I have zero problem with Apple forcing a renegotiation of terms between publishers and Amazon. I have serious qualms about Apple totally disrupting what was a very healthy trend towards reasonably priced ebooks. Amazon was most certainly protecting publishers from themselves regardless of the split behind the scenes. When you compel people to pirate content there is nothing for anyone to split. Apple disregarded this entirely because at the end of the day they don't really care if people pirate, they just want to make sure the content is available on their hardware.