Apple, Steve Jobs, E-Book Prices and the Day New York Publishers Finally Tried to Kill Amazon.com
If you’re going to take a shot at your most formidable enemy, don’t miss. It turns out that is what happened in the Steve Jobs-Publishing Industry-E book-Collusion-Lawsuit story. And if you’re like me, I’ll bet you find the whole set of events very hard to grasp, and somehow just not that compelling to invest hours of research to piece together. We shout “hallelujah” for the wonderful piece (“The Stupidest Thing Apple Ever Did”) in Slate by Farhad Manjoo that does a beautiful job of explaining and contextualizing the saga of how Steve Jobs used the publishers to smash Amazon’s e-book monopoly (thanks to Leah Spiro for sending to me). Well, it didn’t turn out too well except for Jeff Bezos—in the familiar position of playing the winning hand because of his superior understanding of Amazon’s consumers.