Actually, Apple’s App Store had already been using a 70%/30% agency split with iOS app developers for a few years, and iTunes was already all set up for that approach. 70/30 would have been Apple’s natural first choice/suggestion for model.

(Why would Apple expect to re-write the existing iTunesConnect backend to accommodate a custom alternate model for a single product line? From their point of view, 70/30 is how they were running their store, and books were just one more product to put into their existing storefront.)

>> Jobs’ move put publishers in a position to go back to Amazon and ask for the same conditions.

Actually, publishers would have been forced to take this new model to Amazon, because of their pre-existing agreements with Amazon. Many publishers’ existing agreements with Amazon require them to give Amazon the best existing price. Most agency prices are actually lower than wholesale list prices, so when the publishers switched to sending out a lower price to Apple, they would have had to take that arrangement to Amazon as well.

Publishers may have leapt at Apple’s customary 70/30 when they realized it would give them a way to set pricing expectations in an emerging market. But overall they appear to have been react-ers, finding an advantage in a conflict between retailers’ contracts, rather than adept schemers and plotters.

Which you are probably very fond of paying, yet you want eBooks to have laughable price-gouging. You’ve become The Man.

Don’t Believe The eBook Anti-Anti-Trust Spin
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/dont-believe-the-ebook-anti-anti-trust-spin/

Firstly, publishers are able to set the wholesale price at whatever they wish. The idea that they have to sell them cheaply is a fallacy. If Amazon wants to make a loss surely its up to them.Cheaply

Secondly, the agency model alone wasn’t sufficient to raise prices but the agreements prohibiting sale by any other model. It was this which had the greatest price fixing impact and that they all acted in concert moving to this model for the launch of ibooks illustrates the collusion.

What wholesale model – the Amazon wholesale model, where Amazon pays the publisher 30% of publisher retail for books? And set retail at whatever will drive all other retailers out if business. No publisher, or retailer other than Amazon, wants to go back to that.

This kind of collusion is everywhere from Wall Street to Oil Companies.
Government doesn’t even prosecute crimes admitted under oath
like Goldman Sachs just testified that they software that was stolen
by a russian was for manipulating the market.

Second, all evidence available, including Steve Jobs’ comments in Walter Isaacson’s biography, suggests that it was Apple that proposed the agency model to the “Big 6″ publishers, not the other way around. Five of the six adopted it as a way to wrest pricing control from Amazon.

Finally, why, exactly, are books different from appliances so far as pricing is concerned? In the U.S., manufacturers have a very constrained ability to control the prices at which their products are sold. They can do so by limiting distribution, by limiting the wholesale margins that resellers get, or by using non-price means (such as co-op fees) to encourage support of pricing policies. Price-fixing is against the law in the U.S (see the Sherman Act), and the EU is expected to take similar action against Apple and the publishers in Europe.

Nope. Hardware is not content. Apple could just as easily have pushed for Kindle apps on the iPad. They didn’t have to open an ebookstore.