Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
That, of course, is not true. If that was all the publishers would care about (avoid predatory pricing), they could have had other ways. Not by pushing the ebook price way over the regularly discounted paperback price.
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Yes it is true. It's called a loss leader and it's actually quite common. Retailers play that game for many reasons. In all probability Amazon is playing it to push publishers out of the picture. After all, Amazon has taken over many of the functions of a traditional publisher. Amazon is very effective at getting products into market channels (they are the market channel), they are the 'printer' (when it comes down to ebooks), and they are very effective at marketing. Customer reviews also take over the 'filtering' role of publishers. For simple books, the author is effectively taking care of typesetting. That doesn't leave very much for the publisher to do.