> Preditory pricing is bad for consumers in the long run, and in every industry outside of software is seen as a bad thing.
Not so fast. "Agency model", which is what the publishers want to mandate, is "retailers have to sell at MSRP". There may be nothing stopping them from refusing to sell through Amazon unless Amazon agrees to MSRP.
That said, lots of industries do work on "retailers pick the pricing", which is the deal that Amazon likes. (Either way, the publishers get to decide how much they charge distributors.)
The "predation" here is that Amazon is willing to take a smaller cut than Apple. That's not predatory. If anything, that's a competitive response to Apple's favored status on a dominant hardware platform.
A competitive response? Amazon was selling books below marginal cost before Apple even entered the ebook market. Unless Amazon is equipped with a time machine, I'm pretty sure this wasn't a response to Apple, just a strategy intended to produce a monopsony.
Not so fast. "Agency model", which is what the publishers want to mandate, is "retailers have to sell at MSRP". There may be nothing stopping them from refusing to sell through Amazon unless Amazon agrees to MSRP.
That said, lots of industries do work on "retailers pick the pricing", which is the deal that Amazon likes. (Either way, the publishers get to decide how much they charge distributors.)
The "predation" here is that Amazon is willing to take a smaller cut than Apple. That's not predatory. If anything, that's a competitive response to Apple's favored status on a dominant hardware platform.