It repeats a claim about a quote from the original article while providing no source to back it up: The whole agreement was actually launched at the behest of Apple’s Steve Jobs, who had wanted to create an e-bookstore for the iPad but didn’t want to compete with Amazon.com’s cheap titles, according to the story.
Given the recent SNAFU over misquoting Google, I’m wary of jumping down Mr. Jobs’ long-dead throat on the basis of a quote of a quote of a source without being able to read the original transcript.
One thing I’m interested in understanding, for instance, is the basis of Apple’s “fear” of Amazon’s prices. I remember from the music business that Amazon did undercut Apple’s prices, but it wasn’t because Apple was unable to make money at a lower price point. It was because the music labels forced Apple to maintain higher prices and then allowed Amazon to offer the same tracks at a lower price in order to generate competition that would give them the leverage they needed to negotiate higher music prices from Apple in the future.
Which they got, and now they can offer a sliding scale of prices, with some tracks being $1.29, something that Jobs and Apple resisted.
So now I’m reading that Apple is trying to price fix all books at the same price, and I am mightily interested in knowing the full story. Perhaps the problem isn’t that Apple is trying to maintain artificially high prices, but that it is trying to prevent publishers from shackling it and it alone with higher prices.