Used to be that Microsoft was the bugbear of all right-thinking Web users and little Apple the oh, so righteous darling. Well, when it comes to ebooks, Apple is no longer little and certainly not righteous.
Comes a lawsuit that’s been long overdue, arguing that Apple is colluding with traditional publishers (HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) to keep ebook prices artificially high. It’s been quite noticeable for a long time now at Amazon, when a paperback sells for $8 or $9 and an ebook for $16. Time to take a big righteous bite out of the wormy Apple.
Via Kindle Review.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
Be interesting and educational to know how much of this $16 “trickles down” to the writer.
Snoopy, in situations like this, it is not so much a matter of trickle down as trickle on!
In traditional publishing, which is what this monopoly is about, the writer gets a cash advance of varying size, and prestige. Rarely does he get more than 20 percent of the sales price and if the book doesn’t sell very well, it goes out of print (remaindered) in less than a year. And that’s it for that book. Bye-bye forever.
What these publishers and Apple are doing is maintaining a defunct business model that needs to be changed to reflect the new reality. For one thing, it costs so little to format and distribute eBooks that they need never go out of availability. And the publisher (or the author by him/herself, as more of them are doing, to the consternation of traditional publishing) can make a tidy profit selling at no more than 99 cents a copy.