"Cut in E-Book Pricing by Amazon Is Set to Shake Rivals"

In the wake of the US government launching antitrust action against book publishers and Apple, cutting prices is what Amazon appears to be doing. What are the publishers and booksellers claiming?

But publishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one. Amazon, already the dominant force in the industry, will hold all the cards.

I wonder how much of this is the booksellers shooting themselves in the foot via the platform locking that they generally insist upon. Most ereaders will support quite a few ebooks formers, but for buying most mainstream books you're stuck with encrypted options that tie the book to a particular type of ereader. Interestingly, with Harry Potter finally becoming available in ebook form, will publishers learn anything?

Among the other innovations Rowling offers is the ability to download up to eight digital copies of each book, either for use on another device or for lending. Again, this seems like an obvious feature that e-book publishers could provide — since digital copies effectively have no cost — but very few do. And at a time when publishers either don’t allow their books to be loaned through libraries at all (as most of the Big Six do not) or have jacked up the prices they charge libraries (as Random House recently did), the Potter books can be loaned an unlimited number of times, and the lending license lasts for five years.

I imagine that for a lot of people the process of getting access to media probably looks a fair bit like the following comic. Of course this doesn't even really get into the whole additional issue of region restrictions (primarily affecting those outside of the US).