Any publisher could set the end-user price for any of their books (speaking of cookbooks, I recently bought a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in paper...$40, but I would not likely pay $40 for another french cookbook I'm not so familiar with, that's price power due to the popularity of that singular book, not a cartel agreement). The problem is the collusion to raise prices in lock-step with other publishers.
The fact it was 9.99 or 14.99 or .99 isn't the problem, it's the fact the publishers colluded together to artificially raise prices. If the price of ebooks was $1000 for some non-collusive(right word?) reason, the government would likely do little, but if the price of ebooks was $.05 by fiat, the government would step in.
It's a weird little world we live in, where the law recognizes multiple players in a market agreeing to artificial price fixing is bad for markets (and people, the actual reason for the law, the constitution doesn't care about markets), but at the same time grants strict monopoly rights to individual players in markets via patents and copyrights.
The fact it was 9.99 or 14.99 or .99 isn't the problem, it's the fact the publishers colluded together to artificially raise prices. If the price of ebooks was $1000 for some non-collusive(right word?) reason, the government would likely do little, but if the price of ebooks was $.05 by fiat, the government would step in.
It's a weird little world we live in, where the law recognizes multiple players in a market agreeing to artificial price fixing is bad for markets (and people, the actual reason for the law, the constitution doesn't care about markets), but at the same time grants strict monopoly rights to individual players in markets via patents and copyrights.