Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Here's an excellent analysis of the lawsuit, presenting good arguments pro and con, some of which may actually be new to the thread:
How Cheap Should Books Be? |
This paragraph was interesting:
Quote:
|
The deal was extremely peculiar. The industry had long operated based on a "wholesale model," where both brick and mortar stores and online merchants like Amazon could buy the books, then offer them to consumers at any price they liked. But Amazon had angered publishers by pricing eBook editions of new best sellers as low as $9.99, treating them as loss leaders to lure more customers into purchasing Kindles. The publishers worried that readers would become used to rock-bottom prices, hurting their long-term profits, and imperiling other important industry fixtures like Barnes & Noble.
|
They wanted you and I to subsidize B&N and other important industry fixtures like poor, poor upstart Apple? I'm totally up for that, where can I send my donation? If they felt strongly that Amazon was the devil, they could have stopped selling their books through Amazon, and been lynched by their shareholders and authors.
They can't make money on an ebook at $9.99? Damn, those pixels must be expensive. I'm aware that Amazon was actually paying them more than $9.99, but nevermind that little detail. They were concerned with cannibalizing hardcover books because Amazon was training all of us consumers to buy ebooks instead for $9.99 or less, oh the horror. Thing is, if consumers want $9.99 ebooks and not $35 hardcovers then that's what publishers should produce. If they don't, there are plenty of small publishers and independent authors willing to fill that need.
The reason they didn't switch to this awesome new pricing model for paper books is....? Ebooks are special snowflakes. Or, maybe it's not so awesome.
Hey dinosaurs, we get that you don't like ebooks. Tag, you're extinct.