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Originally Posted by Andrew H.
Amazon offered very low prices on a *tiny* percentage of their e-book sales....
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I agree that Amazon's policy did not quite border on predatory pricing; IMO it leans much more towards a "loss leader," which is legal. However, it's pretty clear that their goal was to establish $10 as the default price, and in a year or two would have started berating the publishers into lowering their wholesale prices.
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Originally Posted by Andrew H
Which is why no one ever brought an anti-trust action against Amazon.
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Actually, legal action against predatory pricing is very rare; in most cases, the alleged offender can't sustain the anti-competitive pricing long enough to permanently cripple the competition.
It is possible that DeBeers engaged in predatory pricing, but I believe most of their anticompetitive practices were on the supply side -- e.g. freezing out diamond merchants who did not toe the line.
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Originally Posted by Andrew H
Anti-competitive behavior is bad because it hurts the *consumer.*
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Actually, that's not really the intent of the laws in question. The goal is simply to maintain fair competition. The consumer be damned.
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Originally Posted by Andrew H
I mean, Baen *gives away* books. Are they engaged in predatory pricing? Or something worse,since there's no pricing at all.  |
Baen -- and other publishers, working through ebook retailers -- give away free books as a promotional strategy all the time. The theory is that it is more cost-effective than spending on advertising, and will encourage the readers to purchase titles by that author or in that series.
Baen also has no hope of dominating the market to the extent that they'd put other publishers who work in their genre out of business. Looks to me like they are in the clear.