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But BN, Sony, and Kobo can sell DRM free Mobi. People enjoyed the Borders and Barnes and Noble card for buying books, remove Agency Pricing and all the sudden you could have a e-book version of the discount card. Kobo does well with EPub readers because of its coupons, remove Agency pricing and now Kobo can sell DRM free Mobi books with the coupon.
Yes, Amazon can match a fair amount of that but I am sure there are ways of making it more challenging. Don't drop the price per book but bundle Stephen King novels and sell the set lower then Amazon does.
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The problem here is this assumes that the competing bookstores stand on an even playing field when it comes to finances and being able to sustain losses on discounts. They don't. Sure, BN could do those types of bundles -and go bankrupt trying to sustain those discount schemes. A BIG reason why Amazon was able to dominate the market so much was because they could discount the price below break-even ,whereas other bookstores could not. At least , so say most business analysts.
Now that has changed a little. BN now has Microsoft as a sugar daddy, and Kobo has Rakuten. But most analysts think Amazon can and will out discount everybody-on non agency priced books.
Now Tor.com will offer agency priced books that Amazon can't discount. If Amazon wants to make money on those books, it will have to offer them at agency price + margin. Tor.com can just sell them at agency price.
Of course, if Amazon wants to be an SOB (and it so often does), it could just match Tor.com's price, and not make any money but maintain market share and deprive customer of a reason to go to Tor.com. Hold on folks, it will be a bumpy ride.