Earlier quoted context omitted.
Price fixing is when parties coordinate to set the prices of their items. It doesn't matter that you're able to sell your books at any price -- if two or more publishers got together and agreed not to cut prices below a certain point, then they were engaged in price fixing, by definition. I'm not really sure what your point was. Was it that a self published $2.99 Jabba the Hut fan fiction novelette proves that collus…
Why does all self-published work need to be of the quality of Jabba the Hut fan fiction? You see my point but have decided to caricature it. I look at this situation and see it as evidence that the days of large publishers acting as gatekeepers for authorship are limited. You seem to look at the same situation and see it as an injustice that merits some kind of intervention at publishers to change the price of publis…
But the now great great grandparent's point about collusion interfering with fair market value was valid and becomes more true the smaller the number of major players there are in a market. The collusion doesn't even have to be explicit. Cutting prices hurts everyone in the market if everyone does it. My reference to Jabba the Hut fiction was hyperbolic, but I do think the smaller players (and thus typically the ones with lower quality) tend to be the ones that don't join in on the collusion.
I certainly don't believe in the infallibility of markets. I don't spend too much thinking about economics, but one thought I've had is that we should tax collusion -- make companies pay a tax proportional to, say, the logarithm of their number of employees / worth, and otherwise keep things pretty laissez-faire (with regulation where needed).