Quote:
Originally Posted by Ak Mike
Steve Jordan - even though as I understand it you are in the business, what you are saying cannot possibly be true. Most books these days are retailed by giant chain stores, either book specialists such as Borders, or general merchandisers like Costco and Walmart. They are more powerful than the publishers, who cannot dictate to them. Further, they get to force the publisher to repurchase the unsold copies of books.
So actually selling to retail is very high stakes and uncertain for the publishers because they cannot know for sure how many paper copies will sell, and it is quite expensive to distribute a paper copy that winds up not getting sold.
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If you check, the first thing you'll discover is that the Big Box stores like Walmart, etc, sell very few books in comparison to what's out there... they only sell the best-sellers, which is a small percentage of the available catalogs. They probably get a good volume price for those books... but I doubt their buy-back is much better than it is at the booksellers like Borders. That means there is still a lot of waste, the publishers still make their desired profit, and the Big Box stores are making a profit, so they just absorb the loss.
The booksellers like Borders are really at the mercy of the publishers, not the other way around. The big pubs control what books the booksellers get, at what price, how much they will buy back, and for how much. If the bookstores gripe, they get fewer books to sell, or lesser-popularity books... that keeps them in line. And the fact that the big stores generally refuse to even consider books outside of their contracted publishers, even when they believe there is at least a local market for them, shows how much they are in the publishers' pockets (aka locked into their contracts).
The publishers also control the distribution of e-books, deciding what is e-published and what is held back. They establish contracted control over e-book prices, DRM, etc, as they see fit... not as e-book sellers or customers demand. Amazon and Sony and every other e-bookseller are in no position to tell the publishers what books to release as e-books... they can only accept the books the publishers release to them.
There is no doubt, the pubs are at the top of the pile, dictating what trickles down to everyone else.