Quote:
Originally Posted by John F
From Kenny's link:
Logically, shouldn't the price of books go down as the number of vendors go down. Fewer vendors means consolidated shipping, less accounting overhead, ... |
Logically increased competition should drive prices down and not up, at least with a heathy free market. It's disingenuous for Shatkin to argue logic here. The publishers can and probably will sell direct in the future. There problem has been that they didn't want to compete with their B&M chain and now their problem is getting people to shop at their site instead of Amazon. If Amazon were to drive up prices as the fear mongers purport it would drive the customers to another competitor or into the hands of the publishers. Amazon isn't stupid they know this, besides are they going to drive up the prices higher then the 50% that the illegal cartel already did?
It's all a big red herring and Shatkin is just another FUD distributor. Amazon is like Walmart, they don't use their market dominance to drive up customer prices, they use it to squeeze their supplier. That's what the publishers are afraid of and that's why the FUD campaign.