Unlike Amazon, Apple is not in the business of selling books. Apple is in the business of selling iPads. Apple doesn't dictate prices - they let you set whatever price you want - because Apple realizes that central planning doesn't work. (Apple' can't know what the right price for frankenstein should be, and doesn't even try, while Amazon, as a retailer, does have pricing experts. Apple just want's %30, and for the market to be as robust and vibrant as it can be.)
Amazon would cut prices against the publishers desires, and the publishers would get the lower revenue. Amazon did this to drive up popularity of the kindle. Apple doesn't believe in operating this way, and has a consistent policy- you set the price.
I believe Apple's approach is superior because more people will sign up and there will be more availability of books. (and the iBook Store is probably much large now than the kindle store was at the same number of quarters after launch.)
I don't know much about Amazon's balance sheet, but I do know that, while Apple does make money from iTunes, it is not strategic money. It is money that helps fund data centers, and stuff like that. Apple's not in the media business, it is in the devices business, and it operates a media business only to generate demand for devices. %30 is meant to show a slight profit, not to boost the bottom line.
According to this infographic (http://p.printingchoice.com/e-books-vs-real-books/) that wholesale price would be about $10 on average for both paper and ebooks and then the retailers could make decisions after that point.
Amazon and Apple own their stores. The publishers own their books. Freedom of association says they have the right to decide what terms to do business with each other. We have a long tradition market pricing in this country, where everyone competes for some mix of market share and profits.
There's no evidence that the 6 publishers and Apple have colluded to set prices, quite the opposite-- in the new model the prices are variable, whereas in the previous model, the prices were fixed by one agency: Amazon.
The real change here is that there is more competition. Before Amazon had essentially a monopoly on ebook sales, and after they have to compete with Apple.
As a result, Amazon may have been able to force prices to be lower by using the publisher's assets as leverage to sell more Kindles at publisher's expense.
But now that there's competition in the ebook store market, do you really think that more competition is going to result in higher prices over time?
Looking at other media sold online, over time the prices have come down (inflation adjusted.)
You might want to fix wholesale prices at $10, but in order to do that, you really would have to engage in price fixing of some sort. That info graphic shows that the cost distribution is different, and that difference is a strong argument for ebooks being cheaper to buy - but not for a specific model of selling them.
There is clearly less pricing diversity after the agency model than before, where there is a single entity setting eBook prices on a book-by-book basis: the publisher.
Maybe it is, but the iBook store is sorely lacking in programming books compared to Amazon (from my experience). I'm guessing there's a lot of other technical books they're missing, too. Perhaps they're targeting the kinds of books "the masses" would purchase.
Also, iBooks is not available outside of iOS.
Those two points are keeping me away from iBooks. (I want to at least read my books on my Macbook Air. Come on, Apple!)
If ebooks are going to be just expensive as paper books then I'm going to buy paper books. Apple and the ebook publishers are just shooting themselves in the foot.