agency vs. wholesale vs. whatever it is that music, movies and tv shows do. So iTunes is a store. They don't have inventory. So they don't buy a bunch of product from distributers and resell to consumers with a markup to create a profit. Well, they have a very small inventory, because it's easily replicated. When Apple started out, they said to the music publishers (if that's what they are), hey, we'll sell your songs, available individually, for $.99 each. Music companies originally wanted to be able to set the price per song, to make some songs available on album purchases only, and so on. But they got steamrolled by Steve Jobs. So it's $.99 per song, $.29 goes to apple, the rest goes to the music company. Eventually, music companies get enough leverage, they get their ability to set variable pricing, so you see $.79 and $1.29 prices. Fine. Apple still gets their 30% cut. I assume the same thing happens with Movies and TV Shows. Production companies can set their prices, Apple takes their 30% cut. Why are eBooks so different? Because of the way it used to be? The way it used to be doesn't make any sense. Actually, looked up wholesale pricing. And I don't understand how that is a good idea when applied to digital goods. It does't make any sense. And this seems to get into something about First Sale Doctrine, and who owns it, or doesn't own it, or is granted a license to it. But it doesn't make any sense. If I could buy directly from an author or a singer, instead of paying a store who pays a publisher who then pays the creator? Where the store and publisher made sense for physical goods, but not so much for digital goods? Does the government understand why it's so different? And which lobby got the DoJ to look into this? Amazon's? Update 4/13/2012 10:42am: Ok. So now I've read some things, and the lawsuit is because the publishers got together, supposedly with Apple as the grapevine, colluded to switch en-masse to the Agency model. Only by doing it all together could they then be in a position to get the model with Amazon to switch to Agency from Wholesale, which I still don't understand how that works for digital books. As for price fixing, I'm confused. So in the wholesale model publishers still have a recommended or suggested retail price. In the agency model there's the retail price. Are those numbers any different? In the wholesale model Amazon could disregard the suggested/recommended price, and sell at whatever they want. Not possible in the Agency model. So by switch models, was that a price fix issue? More like preventing stores from charging whatever they want.