Quote:
Originally Posted by carld
Searching for Harlequin turns up 5,852 results at the Kindle store. My guess is Harlequin is perfectly happy selling their books through Amazon.
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They also have a lot of free ebooks on Amazon, something that is apparently difficult to achieve. I doubt real publishers have much interest in selling direct to consumers. If they wanted to they could have done that years ago with real books long before Amazon got a stranglehold on distribution.
It's like selling on Ebay. You could sell on your own website a lot cheaper (or sell at the same price and make a lot more profit), but Ebay is where all the buyers are. Access to those buyers is worth the percentage that Ebay (and Amazon) takes. All their costs are built into what the buyer pays anyway, so it's not as if it really matters.
Without any price incentive nobody would bother buying direct from publishers. And if they undercut Amazon they would just get price-matched and make even less money. Smaller publishers would also risk being de-listed completely.