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Originally Posted by crossi
I still don't think it's impossible for the publishers to determine if Amazon is selling their books at a loss in aggregate. They know how many of any specific title is sold in any month. They have to know because Amazon pays them for each sale. They know how much Amazon paid them for those books. They know the price Amazon was selling them for. It's on Amazon's web site. They can do the math.
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They know what price Amazon is selling them for right now; they won't know if Amazon runs short-term sales unless they're tracking every single title they sell and have a constant feed updating when the price changes.
If Amazon has a "summer study special: all books with 'school' in the title are marked down 10% this week," publishers don't have a way of tracking that. If Amazon decides to discount "all books with keyword 'zombie apocalypse,' again, unless the publishers are tracking each of their titles, they don't have a way to tell. If Amazon discounts "all NYT Bestsellers"... that's a small enough list that publishers can tell, and high-profile enough to notice, but they still don't have a way of knowing how many were sold *at the sale price* as opposed to at other prices. When exactly did that sale start, and when did it end?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
Actually, they do have to sell to Amazon. If a bunch of producers get together and agree not to sell to a particular retailer... well, they've just colluded to reduce competition, which will violate Sec. 1 of the anti-trust act and put them right back where they are now, except facing greater sanctions.
They would also be prohibited (under the Robinson-Patman Act) from charging Amazon different prices for their goods from other retailers. (In the 90's, Penguin had to pay $25 million to independent booksellers for repeatedly violating the R-P Act).
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They can't *collude* to stop selling at Amazon. They can independently decide to walk away from a retailer. Some publishers have done that--IGN avoided Amazon until they got better contract terms.
They might not be able to sell to Amazon at different prices, but they can do other things to support other vendors, if they wanted: windowed releases (not bloody likely, but possible); non-DRM at other vendors, DRM-only at Amazon (ditto); possibly offering bulk discounts to other vendors that Amazon doesn't get (not sure where those fall into the mess); support with prizes and coupons--buy the book from Diesel and get a code good for a free bonus download from the publisher website--and so on. They could *support* other vendors, seek out stores that they want to improve.
Instead, they seem to want to deal with one big store, and the publicity and simplicity that brings, but not the market influence that brings. Makes sense. What they want to deal with, what their business model is based on, is working through a *distributor*, and having that company sell to retailers. They don't like having to deal directly with dozens of retailers, much less the horror of dealing directly with millions of customers.