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Originally Posted by Synamon
They wanted you and I to subsidize B&N and other important industry fixtures like poor, poor upstart Apple?
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All the players want high prices, at least in the long run. Apple, the highest capitalized company in the world, might be the one firm which could potentially destroy Amazon by underpricing. But Apple's strategy of continuous high prices has been so successful that I can't see them giving it up, even just for a couple years to destroy a competitor.
Google does have a low price strategy (2 cents a minute telephone calls from US to much of Europe, for example). But I don't think they price in a predatory way. They still will charge that 2 cents even if Verizon gets out of the long distance business.
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Originally Posted by Synamon
I'm aware that Amazon was actually paying them more than $9.99, but nevermind that little detail.
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Mind it. The loss leader was temporary.
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Originally Posted by Synamon
Hey dinosaurs, we get that you don't like ebooks. Tag, you're extinct.
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How much footnoted non-fiction do read?
Non-fiction is recent decades seems to me to be generally much better than in past centuries, and I attribute that to professional editing. It seems to me that if you value serious non-fiction, you shouldn't be so cavalier about getting rid of professional help-the-author-to-write-a-much better-book editing.
Fiction is different in that there always will be a few authors able to produce great works with copy editing only.
Do I really favor price-fixing? Well, I never have before, and the agency model is just a polite term for horizontal price fixing. So it's a close call for me. But Amazon's history of obviously predatory pricing, and their treatment of employees as documented in newspaper exposes last year, does not lead me to cheer them on.