The gavel might be just a bit early, but maybe just maybe Amazon and Apple might be guilty of doing a little price fixing. Maybe.

They’re both being investigated by Connecticut’s Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, for possible unfair business practices (i.e. price fixing, collusion, whatever you want to call it).

It’s not funny at all, but all I really want to say is this: It’s about freakin’ time.

Pricing in hardware aside, has anyone noticed that each is selling e-books sometimes at higher prices than the actual hardcopy? Or how about that they’re pricing on certain titles, say The DaVinci Code, is exactly the same?

I get economics and pricing with the market leader, followers, and all those other things that go into an efficient pricing and production model, but it’s just a little bit curious that both companies (on separate platforms) should strike similar pricing from book publishers.

Not only that, but CNNMoney.com goes even more in-depth and identifies e-book pricing with Nook (B&N), Borders, and several other competitors had identical pricing.

There’s the argument here that book pricing in brick-n-mortar stores are typically the list price of the book, set by the publisher. It will usually be same price everywhere you go, unless you find a joint that’s got some sales going on.

But with e-books, I don’t see where the cost is printing a physical copy. It’s a copy-paste from the author’s original work and at most there might be some OCR scanning work? So, I don’t get the high price with e-books when you can grab something on Amazon for cheap or find a book liquidator seasonally working in a rented temp space.

Where’s the competition? I’m certainly curious to see how this investigation goes.

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