Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
However, agency pricing has *not* worked to support small independent ebook stores. Fictionwise was crippled; AllRomanceEbooks lost access to the agency books for almost a year; the EZReader ebook store is a flop.
Also, when ebook prices are fixed but pbook prices aren't, consumers are stuck with the ridiculous situation of pbooks often priced lower than the ebooks, which leaves them confused, suspicious and angry at the entire publishing industry, which is not good for anyone's business.
It's possible that industry-wide price-fixing would benefit smaller stores and indie publishers, but there's no movement in the US to allow that.
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The purpose of agency pricing was to reduce Amazon's power and allow a diversity of ebook retailers, not solve every problem in the ebook marketplace. It did what it did. Reversing agency pricing would in all likelihood re-establish an Amazon monopoly, with lower prices at first but with Amazon free to do anything it wanted to do to protect its profit margins, from raising prices to squeezing authors.
As for Fictionwise, do you honestly think that it would have survived long trying to out discount Amazon? How do you know it wasn't on the point of bankruptcy when BN bought it? Frankly, we just don't know how successful its business model was. About all we know is that we liked their discounts-which doesn't mean that they were making money.