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Originally Posted by Sil_liS
This doesn't make sense. You said that Amazon is responsible for a "significant part of any publisher's revenue". If they were playing a game of chicken, Amazon wasn't trying very hard, since they could just refuse to sell the pbooks if they can't sell the ebooks. Another way is to stop giving pbook discounts, and promote primarily the ebooks and used pbooks.
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You seem to want this whole thing to make logical coherent sense, and to be easily understandable. The reality is going to be that within Amazon there are a bunch of people continually arguing about what is the best way to move forward, and the same within each of the major publishers.
During the brief time when Amazon was peeing on the cornflakes of some of their key suppliers of profitable inventory, and the publishers were peeing on the cornflakes of their biggest single customer, you can bet there were an awful lot of fraught meetings going on within each and every company, as the people tasked with maintaining profitability of the pbook sales arm-wrestled the ones whose salaries depended on growing the ebook business.
Meanwhile the executives would have been demanding that this all get sorted out soon so the fuss dies down before the next stockholders meeting, various individuals would have been giving off-the-record hints to people they knew and trusted on the 'other side' in order to trip up colleagues they didn't like and/or help steer things to an amicable conclusion, lots of other important projects would have been going down in flames because everyone was distracted by the fight, and on and on and on.
I've been involved in a few customer-supplier dustups, and you have to remember that even if there is a master plan involved, it's usually wrong. Most of the people involved are either ordinary schmoes who just want to get to year-end without being fired for screwing the pooch, or crazed egomaniacs who've drunk too much espresso after reading some crappy management book they found at the airport. There are generally no geniuses involved in these affairs.
My personal take on this - could the publishing industry make a better job of dealing with The Coming of The Ebook? Certainly.
Based on what has happened over the years in every other industry that has faced disruptive change, can we realistically hope the industry to get it right without a lot of stress, confusion, job losses, bankruptcies, customer inconvenience and stacks of money flushed down the toilet? No.
I think eBooks will be a mess for several more years, because the people who actually have to take the decisions and do stuff have their livelihoods on the line. Given the choice between boldly striding forth into a brave new world at the risk of an immediate pink slip, or muddling through for one more year as things are, muddling is usually the most attractive option.
Fortunately, the situation with ebooks is not so bad. Relative to e.g. people who have to fly twice a week, or spend a lot of time in dealing with hospitals, government departments or the like, ebook fans are blessed. With luck, things will improve from 'rubbish' to merely 'mediocre' in the next few years, and there is still a small hope of achieving 'efficient and rational'.