Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
The so-called bestsellers don't add up to that much of Amazon's Kindle business or even enough of each publisher's share of Kindle business to stop them from doing it.
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Oh?
Let's take a hypothetical best-seller that sells 500,000 ebook copies. A price war ensues, and the retailer takes a $2 loss on every copy. That's a $1 million hole they need to climb out of. That's going to limit their ability to slash prices on other books by that publisher -- especially if it happens to be a publisher like Scholastic, which has a small number of very big sellers, and a lot of "long tail" books.
Several big retailers may be willing to treat selected best-sellers like loss leaders, but that doesn't mean they aren't important to the retailers.
Or, to put it another way: The more heavily they discount the best-sellers, the less latitude they have to cut prices on other ebooks.