Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Suppose that Amazon paid a billion dollars for eBooks, and sold them to customers for a billion dollars.
They actually would be losing a lot on those books for reasons such as:
[...]
It seems to me that figuring out whether books are being sold at a loss is complex and filled with judgment calls.
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The settlement details that have been discussed do not address this, only the sale price vs list price. They do not require the retailer not to make an operating loss, only requires them not to discount sale price by more than 30%, so that there is some money left from their Agency cut. That could be as little as 1c over the entire ebook line from that publisher, and still meet the requirements, even though that clearly wouldn't cover their costs.
It is a way of 'protecting' ebooks prices, not a way of preventing Amazon out-discounting other retailers.