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Originally Posted by murraypaul
Isn't that exactly what the Agency agreement is, a requirement that the price is fixed by the publisher and not lowered by the retailer?
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Yes. Like I said, the discount may go away because the retailer chooses to stop offering it, or because the producer of the products the retailer sales makes it impossible to offer it.
The issue is the number of folks who seem to feel that getting a discount is some sort of inherent right they are entitled to. Not so, alas.
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Until and unless it is found to be unlawful. In the UK I can't see how they can get away with exactly what they were forced to stop doing for pBooks.
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I don't know what the UK law on the matter is, though I expect it's broadly similar to the US.
In the US, it's legal so far (and you may assume the publishers had their legal staffs burning the midnight oil to confirm it was legal before proceeding.) What they've done is to alter the relationship between the publisher and the retailer. In the new model, the retailer isn't a traditional retailer, reselling goods it buys from a producer. It's an agent selling
for a producer, at a price the producer sets, and getting a specified cut for its services.
This has interesting implications I haven't seen discussed here, like taxes: in an agent relationship, the
producer is responsible for applicable taxes, not the agent. So Amazon, which has a plethora of local tax codes to deal with in web sales that determine whether an item is taxable where the buyer lives and how much tax is charged, charges and remits the applicable sales taxes on items it resells as a
retailer, but apparently
isn't responsible for those taxes on items sold under Agency Pricing. I have
no idea how this is being handled by Amazon and the publishers.
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Dennis