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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Is Amazon an agency publisher in your view?
It's true that they charge less, and have promotions, but since Amazon Publishing sets its own on-line prices, I'd say yes. And Amazon Publishing titles are not licensed to Overdrive.
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No, they're not an Agency publisher. They don't have contracts with ebook retailers that say retailers pay them a flat percentage of list price with no discounts available. (AFAIK, they only sell books through Amazon. Which may be just as restrictive as Agency pricing, but is a different financial setup.)
Amazon Publishing--as opposed to KDP, which pays no advances, does no editing, and allows authors to set their own prices--is a small publishing house. It gets a lot of notice because it tangles into everything else Amazon does, and it helps promote the Amazon
monopsony. But as publishers go, it's tiny. It makes PR announcements that it'll be releasing less than two dozen titles in a line per season.
It's likely to be ridiculously profitable, as publishers go, because it's using the KDP program to find popular authors and offer them contracts, in addition to whatever traditional methods it uses. But it's hardly keeping tens of thousands of titles away from libraries.