Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
@Elfwreck: I'm ignorant about what these ebook selling arrangements look like. With paper books, I could guess that a publisher could limit how much a store sold by capping how many paper copies they gave them. Do they have the same sort of leverage with electronic copies? Or does the store get to sell as many as they can get away with once they have a copy of the ebook file? If the latter, it would leave the publishers' other markets more vulnerable to Amazon's price-cutting than it did with paper books, wouldn't it?
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Currently, Amazon sells as many copies as they can as fast as they can, based on a single original file. However, publishers *could* negotiate contracts that limit sales, capping them at a certain number or certain pace. It's just never come up before; publishers have never wanted stores to be sold out of something that could be making money.
And they don't want to say "Amazon can only sell 3000 copies/week of the new bestseller." They know that'll annoy customers. Instead, they want to push the price up so that customers will consider buying a hardcover or TPB instead. (Which, for backlists, is really missing the point, since used paperbacks are often $.01+shipping. If they want to clobber Amazon, they need to sell lots of ebooks at *less than that shipping cost,* which Amazon keeps most of.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by BuddyBoy
Yes, and it also highlights the disingenuous "protect the bookstores" argument from the Authors Guild. If you want to protect independent bookstores, then apply the agency pricing model to your printed books. If everybody has to sell at the same price, then the local store that is currently being walloped by Costco and Walmart, far more so than by Amazon, would have a fighting chance. Of course, that would drastically impact sales, and earnings for authors, but it would protect all those bookstores those all too altruistic autors want to save.  |
It's also been pointed out that the BPHs had nothing bad to say when Amazon sold hardcovers below cost. Somehow, that wasn't "destroying the bookstores," but selling something that bookstores cannot offer, is.
And yeah. If they switched to mandatory minimum pricing *everywhere,* small bookstores would have the advantage of knowledgeable staff and curated selection, and big chains would have a broader range of popular books and possibly quicker access, because they'd get the new hot books faster than little stores deciding whether to carry them.
They don't want that, either. They *like* their cozy deals with big distributors and bulk discounts. And they have some idea, as little as they want to acknowledge it, how much readership of new books would drop if those 30-60% discounted hardcovers disappeared.