3 ms·

I don't think it's true that they agreed on a set price. eBooks are sold at various prices. What they agreed to was the ability to set end-user prices. Do you

• fpgeek 15y ago
  They also talked quite a bit about specific price points ($12.99 and $14.99 instead of $9.99 according to the complaint). That's more than the ability to set end user prices.
  • rbarooah 15y ago
    Sure, but $9.99 and even lower are still options which do in fact get used. Apple didn't set prices, they provided publishers with a range of options that included the old price point.
• qdog 15y ago
  Any publisher could set the end-user price for any of their books (speaking of cookbooks, I recently bought a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in paper...$40, but I would not likely pay $40 for another french cookbook I'm not so familiar with, that's price power due to the popularity of that singular book, not a cartel agreement). The problem is the collusion to raise prices in lock-step with other publishers. The fact it was 9.99 or 14.99 or .99 isn't the problem, it's the fact the publishers colluded together to artificially raise prices. If the price of ebooks was $1000 for some non-collusive(right word?) reason, the government would likely do little, but if the price of ebooks was $.05 by fiat, the government would step in. It's a weird little world we live in, where the law recognizes multiple players in a market agreeing to artificial price fixing is bad for markets (and people, the actual reason for the law, the constitution doesn't care about markets), but at the same time grants strict monopoly rights to individual players in markets via patents and copyrights.