[Tim Wilson] "Apple is never going to get a penny of it because they're doing it WRONG. Which is idiotic. They're running their book business like they never heard of iTunes."
In order to lure publishers away from exclusively supporting Amazon, Apple offered to take a substantially smaller cut than Amazon was taking and let publishers set their own prices. Did publishers turn around and say "Great! Now that we're getting 70% instead of 30-40%, we can lower prices"? They did not. They
raised prices. This is silly, and it is broken, but it's hard to see what Apple could have done. With music, Apple had some clout to try to force record labels onto Apple's pricing scheme. With books, because Amazon, not Apple, was the market leader, Apple didn't have such clout.
(Apple also lets app developers set their own prices, of course, and apps tend to be priced quite reasonably, but this is probably attributable to the app market being so much more competitive -- there are many more app developers than major publishing companies.)
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