> I don't tend to buy bestsellers, so maybe I'm not hurt as much by the higher prices for that category, but I do still see $12.99 prices on new books.
Interesting reason for the $12.99 books: the ones I see are from Random House and are being sold under the agency model still. You can tell because it says "price set by publisher". Random House was not part of the price fixing suit.
And yeah, generally speaking, this whole case was about bestsellers. No one cares about downlist stuff, they care about hurting the value of their NY Times bestselling hardcovers.
I'm honestly scared of Apple after learning of the abusive(?) manner by which they got Random House to adopt agency pricing for ebooks:
Random House, the largest publisher, resisted Apple's call to adopt the agency model in 2010. But the company capitulated a year later in order to get its books on the iPad.
"Apple decided to pressure Random House to join the iBookstore," Cote wrote. "As Cue wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook, 'When we get Random House, it will be over for everyone.' Apple had its opportunity in the Fall of 2010, when Random House submitted some e-book apps to Apple’s App Store. Cue advised Random House that Apple was only interested in doing 'an overall deal' with Random House. By December, they had begun negotiations, and Random House executed an agency agreement with Apple in mid-January 2011. In an e-mail to [Steve] Jobs, Cue attributed Random House’s capitulation in part to 'the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store this week.'"
Interesting reason for the $12.99 books: the ones I see are from Random House and are being sold under the agency model still. You can tell because it says "price set by publisher". Random House was not part of the price fixing suit.
And yeah, generally speaking, this whole case was about bestsellers. No one cares about downlist stuff, they care about hurting the value of their NY Times bestselling hardcovers.