Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
There is *no way* that Amazon could afford to negotiate separate contracts with thousands of indie authors, many of whom will sell less than 100 books, total. I don't get to negotiate the price I'm paying for books with Amazon, either. If I don't like their price, I'll look elsewhere.
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There's an interesting analysis of the problems with the Kindle contract (
http://www.sfwa.org/2009/07/amazon-k...and-annotation ), though they're less about pricing. (Especially since they've now allowed the self-published author to set their own price and get a reasonable 70% of it.)
While Amazon today has, say, 80% of the ebook market, customers will flock to any site in droves that offers a much better experience (e.g. same titles and lower price). Amazon can be a bully, but they ultimately aren't immune to competition. And with ebooks so easy to work with, competition is much easier. (Remember how fast Google displaced Alta Vista, which at the time seemed the unassailable best search engine.) We're just seeing the very earliest days of the ebook market. Lot can change in a short period of time. All of which will probably be better for the reader, on the whole.