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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
However I cannot imagine that a retailer is paying for a block of 10,000 copies of a title, selling those copies off, ordering more if too many are sold, and returning unsold copies.
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So he "orders" them one by one, and? It's till not much of a difference: producer (publisher) -> en gros merchant (distributor) -> en detail merchant (reseller) -> customer (reader). The only time the producer
should get a say about the price is when he delivers to the wholesaler. With tangible good it works that way, too.
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OK, but my point is: If it isn't the publisher's business, then who should set the price for self-published books?
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Self-published? Why, if you're buying from the author he can ask for any price he likes. And talking about Smashwords: if they suddenly decided to want to sell your book for less than your asking price (while covering the difference out of their own pocket), they should certainly be allowed to do that.
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Conversely, why is it OK for Apple to set a flat cost of $1 per song?
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Not the same thing. That's their business model, and they are getting publishers to agree to that. Agency pricing for music would mean "nobody can sell that .mp3 for less than amount X", or, more drastically, "this CD must not be sold for less than amount Y". No merchant in his right mind would accept that.
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Ultimately the problem isn't really "manufacturers setting prices."
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Yes it is. And if the various anti-trust authorities would get their heads out of their collective asses they'd do something about it. It doesn't affect us as much in Europe, but then only because we've always had government-mandated price-fixing for books anyway.
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agency pricing = higher prices.
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Perception? That's a reality. Have you kept an eye on Random House titles? Prices for all of them, without exception, rose significantly on the 1st of March. Care to speculate why that might be?
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If agency pricing resulted in lower prices for new books, I'm convinced that no one would care in the slightest.
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That's akin to saying "if shit tasted like chocolate nobody would mind eating it". Possibly true, but completely missing the point.