That is not what I've read, but rather it merely allows Apple to match lower prices elsewhere for the same product, so I still don't see how this could be price fixing.
How did it "ensure"? The publishers were absolutely able to sell at Amazon and Apple for 9.99 if they wanted, but they didn't.
The publishers even before Apple arrived tried various steps to change their deals with Amazon and let it sell for more, they just haven't had any negotiation power.
From the court document:
"Well aware of the Publishers’ experimentation with windowing, Apple also told Publishers that it opposed windowing; it believed that withholding e-books alienated customers and led to piracy."
The fact that the prices raised doesn't prove anything to me (that's the only thing I see in the article). Of course the publishers got more power with the new store. Of course they wanted to sell at higher prices even before Apple appeared, but couldn't, because Amazon didn't have real competition. What was Apple supposed to do? To open the exact same store as Amazon? Why?
And how was Apple doing anything what the publishers didn't do themselves? The CEO's had their meetings without Apple, even before, as I've already quoted. And after the meetings with Cue, they continued. Cue didn't organize them:
"After Young had met with Apple but before S&S had its meeting, Young could not resist calling Reidy to share the wonderful news that the “Top Man” at Apple opposed $9.99 pricing. He hesitated to say more because S&S would be meeting with Apple the following day, and he did not want to “spoil [the] fun.”"
It's obvious the publishers communicated, but I don't see Apple's guilt.
All my quotes here and in other posts here are from the court decision.
Like the author of that text, I find the context (publishers wanting different pricing for best-sellers even before Apple and the entrance of Apple to the market that breaks the Amazon's monopoly, Apple be willing to sell the way the publishers prefer) actually important.
As I understand it, the core problem is that when Apple price-matches, the 70/30 split between the publisher and Apple doesn't change. If the other retailer (e.g. Amazon) has the freedom to set their prices via the wholesale model, the publisher will start making less money in the iBookstore (and any other "agency MFN" retailers, which eventually included Nook as a willing participant) on any book that retailer chooses to discount, even though the publisher has no control over that price. To avoid this problem, each publisher has to switch all of their retailers to the agency model - giving up the extra money they make when a wholesale retailer charges their customer a discounted price but pays the publisher the full wholesale price in return for greater control over the prices the final customers pay.
