Publishers Now Offering Agency Pricing 2.0 (big win for Publishers)

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

In other words, good for Amazon

Of course it's good for Amazon. But the publishers were insisting that agency pricing was meant to prevent Amazon's monopoly.

Originally Posted by Fbone

We're not seeing large discounts now when there is only one 12-month period possible. December 2012 starts one period then January starts the second. Retailers may be waiting to see how sales develop for several months to see how much more they can discount. Or they may do special time limited sales. Daily Deals, weekly highlights, movie-tie ins, etc.

In any case. Amazon isn't, as far as I can see, discounting up to their full 30% commission. Maybe they are content matching other retailers. They must have good reasons for their strategy.

I think that they are waiting to see the publisher's strategy first.

Originally Posted by sun surfer

One possible remedy is that they could only sell a certain number of books before the discount ends rather than ending a deal after a certain amount of time.

That way, they'd be able to automatically stop the discount before the loss per book exceeds profits.

625 discounted books left! Buy yours now!

[Catlady]

It makes sense to me.

[Apache]

There are cases of vendors suing retailers for selling their products at a lower price than the vendor allows. And the vendors won.
Apache

[Top100EbooksRank]

the following should explain it all really.

http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/10/wh...ok-prices-now/

Agency pricing has been declared legal, and it doesn’t go away now. The settling publishers can still sell their ebooks to retailers under agency contracts, where they set a book’s list price and the pay the retailer a commission. The difference now is that retailers can discount the ebooks however they want.

However, there are limited exceptions: The settlement allows HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster to negotiate new contracts that include “a commitment from an e-book retailer that a retailer’s aggregate expenditure on discounts and promotions of the Settling Defendant’s ebooks will not exceed the retailer’s aggregate commission under an agency agreement in which the publisher sets the ebook price and the retailer is compensated through a commission.” The settling publishers can also negotiate one-year contracts that “prevent e-book retailers from cumulatively selling that Settling Defendant’s e-books at a loss over the period of the contract.”


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this prevent a retailer from taking a loss on an aggregate / overall basis of a publisher catalog. Which mean a retailer can take a loss on a particular book if they want to.

In fact, selling 10% of book titles at loss and selling 90% of book titles at profit is legal as long as the retailer don't make a loss on the overall catalog.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Top100EbooksRank

In fact, selling 10% of book titles at loss and selling 90% of book titles at profit is legal as long as the retailer don't make a loss on the overall catalog.

This was (leaving aside the specific numbers) basically Amazon's pre-agency approach: they heavily discounted NY Times bestsellers, but not the vast majority of their books.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by Top100EbooksRank

Agency pricing has been declared legal, and it doesn’t go away now.

Agency pricing was never illegal, nor was there a suggestion that it was.
The illegality was in colluding to all introduce the same terms at the same time.

[tubemonkey]

The cure for agency pricing is to not buy their books. Problem solved.

[cfrizz]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

The cure for agency pricing is to not buy their books. Problem solved.

BINGO! Unfortunately, that won't happen with the majority of the people.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by cfrizz

BINGO! Unfortunately, that won't happen with the majority of the people.

I agree, but I think it will still be a surprising number. Some will do without. Some will use libraries or borrow from friends. And some, of course, will pirate.

Also, it will be interesting to see how this new version of agency pricing comes to be across the large publishers without collusion. Especially if Amazon or any of the other large players wanted to resist signing these contracts. At the same time we have some well known established authors leaving the big publishers for better deals. It will be interesting to see where things end up.

[TallMomof2]

I think that the prices are laughable as I see the dead tree versions steeply discounted. IN the US, walk into any Costco and you'll find dead tree books selling for less than the ebooks. I've been very happy over the last few years trying out new authors outside of the price fixing cartel. Sourcebooks has been getting a lot of business from me and I'll remain loyal to Baen as long as the book prices don't go too high.