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)