Quote:
Originally Posted by Mememememe
The Amazon report doesn't mean all that much. Hardcover sales aren't a big part of their business, anyway. Such is the case with most booksellers, but it's particularly the case with Amazon, which has always been heavily paperback, almost to the point of exclusivity. Online retailers like Amazon and Indigo are terrible outlets for hardcover.
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Oh, really?
Then why were the publishers so upset at Amazon's default $9.99 price for Kindle editions, threatened to withhold books from Amazon, and finally imposed the Agency model on pricing, requiring Amazon to charge a higher price and give the publisher a bigger cut?
The move was to protect the hardcover
best seller. Those are the jewels of the industry. They generate the highest revenue, carry the highest margins, and make the most profit. Amazon was selling Kindle editions at the
same time as the hardcover release, and enough people who wanted the book now chose the ebook edition at $9.99 over the hardcover's much higher price. The publishers were seeing the impact in terms of lower revenue, and reacted.
Amazon is the world's largest catalog retailer, and the largest book retailer. If they do a lot more business in paperbacks, that's simply because the industry as a whole is far more paperback than hardcover. Amazon sells a lot of hardcovers, thank you - enough that a consortium of publishers imposed a different model on them to protect revenues and profits from lower priced electronic editions.
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Dennis