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Originally Posted by rhadin
You state that as fact but I think it is more of an assumption. Amazon certainly gave the impression that it was opposed to the agency system, but it really did little to fight its implementation. Amazon was certainly in a position to exert significantly more pressure on the publishers in opposition to agency pricing, but it didn't.
Let us not forget that agency pricing has been good for Amazon financially and I suspect that Amazon's protestations were pro forma and designed to lull consumers rather than a stout-hearted attempt to influence the issue.
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Shatzkin on winners and losers from agency pricing:
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Barnes & Noble (Nook), Google, and Kobo all benefited enormously from Apple’s arrival on the scene in April 2010 because they brought with them the “agency” sales model that leveled pricing across all outlets for the ebooks that come from the biggest publishers. Without agency, many believe (and I’m one of them) that Amazon Kindle’s aggressive loss-leader pricing policies on the biggest books would seriously have diminished the competition.
B&N needs every penny it can spare to invest in device development and marketing; they’d be seriously handicapped if they had to give away margin to compete for consumers.
Google has signed up about 300 independent stores in the US to be partners in its ebook program. They might not have 10% that many if the indies thought they had to compete with loss-leader pricing on the biggest books even to play. When Random House switched over to agency at the beginning of March this past year — 11 months after it began — one of the motivations they cited was to respond to the desire of independent stores to sell ebooks which they heard over and over again depended on agency pricing.
Kobo has always had a global strategy that could enable them to thrive even if they had also-ran status in the US market. But they were trying hard to compete with Amazon pricing in the pre-agency days and as the smallest of the big global ebook players, they would have to be considered the most vulnerable in an environment characterized by loss-leader price warfare.
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