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Did Apple conspire with publishers to keep e-book prices high?

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In all honesty, I don't think Apple conspired on the ebooks - I think they knew they needed to get publishers to work with them since other companies were already way ahead in the ebook/ereader market so Apple agreed to the terms set by the companies to get more titles in their store.

That said, in all honesty, I don't buy my ebooks through Apple. I don't like the pricing structure as it's too close to print books for many of the materials I have looked at in the past and/or the price difference between an eBook for iBooks vs Kindle were just too great to justify - plus I like the Kindle reader better for locating positions in books since if I have to reference something, iBooks just sucks at finding the same location if people use different fonts (at least it has, I haven't looked at the latest version, but I assume it still works like it has). On top of that I don't like only being able to read the books on my iOS device - I like having flexibility of being able to read it on my computer when I want to and/or just don't have my iOS device (ie: my wife is using it lol)
 

bobtomay

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Nope. And by the same token, has Apple conspired with every developer of every app on both the iOS and Mac app stores? Every one of them are allowed to set their own price for their software submitted to those stores.

I could see there being some collusion between the book publishers though.
While the software developers are seeing the advantage of the app stores and many are lowering their price due to the increased sales volume, the book publishers view it a different way. They're looking at it as a way to get into the retail side of the business and start bringing in that portion of the monies that historically have gone to the merchants.
 
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I see this more as something the eBook publishers would conspire to do than Apple. the iBooks store is far from being the only ebook seller around, and the prices are fairly consistent across all of them. All Apple did was give publishers a less restrictive option (price-wise) than Amazon's store. Which, as the article suggested, is funny in an ironic sort of way since you could argue that the iTunes store and Amazon MP3 store were in opposite positions not so long ago.
 

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