Quote:
Originally Posted by Suzanna
Wouldn't Amazon have ended up winning the war pre-Agency model if they'd just toughed it out and waited for all their customers to buy other products, showing Macmillan they didn't really need their books in the Amazon store after all?
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I think Amazon knew that the rest of the big publishers were backing Macmillan and would also pull their books as contracts came up for renewal, that's too big a loss to them.
As for buying something else, I've done it a couple of times, but if I go to a shop to buy a specific game or book (when I still used to shop off-line for books) and they didn't have it, I went to another store. That's one of the reasons Amazon used to get the majority of my paper book buying, it was very rare they didn't have the book I wanted available for shipping.
I think Amazon could have managed to convince customers to buy other authors had just Macmillan pulled out and in time authors would put pressure on Macmillan to get their books in the highest grossing store, but Amazon probably knew the rest of the big publishers would follow and that would likely be too big a loss.
Even more so at a time when they're still growing their user base and locking customers into the kindle. Existing customers would likely make do with the odd missing title since they can't use any other store to buy their kindle books (those who don't know or want to DRM free their books). But, if Amazon lost too many publishers, new buyers might go with non kindle devices where the stores have a wider selection.