Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
However, it should be noted that not all the publishers switched at the same time; notably, Random House successfully negotiated agency pricing much later than the others.
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Not quite the way the timeline played out:
RH refused to join the initial conspiracy and took advantage of the price hikes to undercut the conspirators and grow their market shre at their expense.
At that point Penguin "suggested" B&N (the biggest pbook retailer still) ought to stop promoting RH books until they joined the price fix.
At that point, whether voluntarily or not, RH had all the leverage of "industry practice" on their side. "Successfully neggotiated" makes it sound harder than it was.
MacMillan?
Amazon caved when Penguin and co told them *they* were also moving to price-fixing and they'd better be ready to do without all the conspiracy's titles.
It might have just been a PR stunt by Amazon but the publicly available data suggests they were willing to out-stare any single publisher but not five. Just as the evidence suggests RH lawyers decided that ganging up to implemment price-fixing was a bad idea.
So far, it's looking $55 million bad with more to come.
Whatever RH is paying their lawyers, they likely *earned* it with that recomendation.