[rverghes]

This is my understanding of the situation:

Traditionally, book publishers sell to stores at a wholesale price. Stores then mark up the price a bit and sell it to the end consumers.

Amazon then started selling books for prices below the wholesale price, deliberately taking a loss.

The publishers got scared that this would destroy all non-Amazon channels, giving Amazon inordinate power over them.

So they got together with Apple and set up a scheme where the publishers would all use the "agent" model. Instead of selling the books to Apple for a fixed wholesale price, they would set the prices however they liked, and Apple would take a cut of 30%.

The publishers would then all refuse to sell to Amazon unless Amazon switched to the agent model.

That, however, is pretty straight-forward collusion and against the law.

[hga]

How many non-intrinsically expensive ebooks had reasonable wholesale prices above $10?

What I've read is that the "below the wholesale price" didn't happen a lot until publishers started raising that price after Amazon created the market. Now, maybe the latter discovered they couldn't afford below $10 wholesale prices, but the method they used to deal with the problem as, as you noted, "straight-forward collusion", and as I add, that harmed the consumer; add the two together and you get a slam dunk anti-trust case.