I think Apple is going to have to give up on the whole idea that you can't sell an e-book for less on some other store. If they want to make 30%, fine, then the publishers can set the price at the wholesale level however they see fit. It is not like the iOS app store where you can only get it from one source. Books are different. You don't have to make any API call in a book . You just read it. That is why I think Apple came up with the iBooks Author format. That way you do need API calls and Apple can control it beginning to end.

Typical Apple sort of behavior. When a company gets bigger than many governments, ISTM that they think that they are entitled do anything that they want to do.

Apple is likely to fight this in court.

Would be a disaster to AAPL's price if they can't settle this. People should be worried, especially at this price level.

Oh how I loathe the current DOJ. The idea that agency pricing is some nasty tool of evil, giant book publishers is total, utter bosh.

Small publishers and self-publishing authors are so delighted by the agency model, that they insisted that Smashwords change its contract to the agency model. Agency pricing allows an author, no matter how unimportant, to hold special sales and test lower prices, knowing that giant retailers will have to change prices on their insistence. Without that those authors would simply be ignored. Amazon would set the price to whatever it wanted and there it would remain.

Look at the facts. Before agency pricing, Amazon had some 90% of the ebook market and, by selling ebook, below cost, was well on the way to destroying all its competition. Now its market share is only about 70%. The reason? Agency pricing meant that Amazon couldn't use its deep pockets to destroy its competitors. We now have a far healthier and more competitive market. The DOJ wants to destroy that.

My own hunch is that Amazon is behind this move. Money, perhaps untraceable money, has gone into certain pockets to bring this about. Never forget that our current administration is simply corrupt Chicago machine politics at the national level. That's where Obama spent virtually his entire political career. Not a single crooked Chicago politician was ever inconvenienced in the slightest by Obama in his entire career.

I don't see why the issue with the agency model. If that is how Apple wants to play they should be allowed to do so.

The only issue the DOJ should care about is Apple forcing their terms on other stores. And the favored nation issue. Publishers should be free to take whatever terms they wish.

Apple should stick to their guns, don't let those bozo's in Washington dictate how companies should sell their products.

Don't these clowns realise that they will be effectively creating a monopoly for whoever has the deepest pockets and can afford to discount the "wholesale" model the longest.

Typical politicians they can't see past their current term in office.