Quote:
Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
And that's because of agency pricing, you say?
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Correct.
To start with, there never was a universal "all ebooks are $10" -- e.g. Sony and B&N routinely charged more than $10 before 2010. Amazon was the only big retailer that regularly hit that price point, and in at least some cases this was done as a loss leader with the specific intent of capturing a controlling market share.
By the way, before agency pricing plenty of people were mercilessly roasting Amazon for all sorts of slights and arrows. This included occasionally setting an ebook price higher than $10 (which provoked all sorts of demonization and vilification, not unlike the attitudes many express towards agency pricing publishers); and numerous attempts to dominate the ebook market and alleged / perceived anti-competitive behavior.
Long story short, yes there are lots of agency priced books that are about 1 year old that are $10. Since it's the publisher setting that price, then yes they're responsible for those price drops, in the same way they're responsible for setting the prices higher.
Do you really need me to explain how and why it's structured this way?