This quote seems to support Amazon's model:
"Traditionally, publishers sold books to retailers for roughly half of the recommended cover price. Under that "wholesale model," booksellers were then free to offer those books to customers for less than the cover price if they wished. Most physical books are sold using this model."
Yes, Apple (and the book publishers) are the ones being sued here, not Amazon.
Yes, Apple is the one pushing for higher e-book prices.
The first couple of comments on this thread seem to contradict everything found in the actual article. Amazon is no the bad guy in the article, and there is nothing (zero, nada) in the article about Amazon price fixing.
It’s not super obvious, but although Amazon’s prices were cheaper, the scheme Apple and the publishers came up with allows more freedom for the publishers to set prices. When Amazon was the only game in town they could say “sell your books for this price”. Now they can’t do that.
Amazon was the one doing the “price fixing”, at an artificially low cost. It’s just like one retailer coming in, undercutting the competition, waiting for them to die, and then raising prices. Except that in this case the “competition” is the producers of the books.
Catbertz, the Amazon model required publishers to sell for any price they wanted, as long as that price was no more than $9.99. The Agency model lets the publisher set a price and the retailer gets a flat percentage. It’s basically the same model Apple uses for its app store and that’s been a wild success.