If you're mad about the ebook market concentrating on Amazon, you should be absolutely furious at Apple over agency pricing. That was when ebookstores were launching and competing for attention. Agency pricing blocked a critical dimension of competition when the big wave of new ebookstores was trying to get off the ground.
And even if Apple didn't want to compete with Amazon over price, others did. For instance Google - their Play Books pricing model seems to be "discount whatever we can, wherever we can". Even in these "agency lite" days, they're still a useful price-match reference for the Kindle Store. Or consider Kobo - they had a regular stream of coupons that made them worth checking for a lot of books... until agency pricing clamped down on the books you could apply them to.
Instead, agency pricing more-or-less froze the ebook market starting in 2010 until 2013 or so (when the last publisher defendant settled and started allowing discounting again), entrenching Kindle as the default platform for most readers, crushing smaller companies that wanted to try something different. More over, this has worrying downstream effects - encouraging many independent authors to be Kindle-only and so on.
I'd say it is even worse than that. The years of strict agency pricing trained people to not even bother looking at competing ebookstores, entrenching Amazon's dominance.
> Jobs wanted to launch iBooks right now and was willing to cut corners to get what he wanted.
We should be precise here. Jobs preferred to cut legal corners with respect to the antitrust laws instead of cutting financial corners by directly competing with Amazon on price.
To me, this is exactly the sort of choice the legal system should punish, even if Jobs had been right about the merits of his hypothetical antitrust complaint against Amazon (which he almost certainly wasn't - Amazon has testified that the Kindle store was a sustainable business on its own, i.e. that the headline new bestseller discounts were more than covered by profits on backlist titles). The antitrust laws, like other laws, shouldn't have exceptions for "justified" vigilantes. That way lies chaos.
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.
This is an article the legal reasoning behind why the iBookstore MFN clause was an antitrust violation - it was designed to impose financial penalties on publishers that did not get all of their retailers to switch to an agency pricing model.
This is similar to an earlier case about Toys 'R Us. They got a group of toy manufacturers to agree to restrict their toy sales to warehouse clubs, so long all the manufactures in the group agreed to do so.