Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
"Silly amounts" -- a price was put on a product, customers paid the price. We aren't talking about food, milk, gas, electricity. No on HAS to buy a just released NYT's best selling ebook.
This very forum is flooded with messages where people have boycotted the "Agency 5" (which became 6). The publishers put a stop to Amazon UNDERPRICING their products...but they have NO POWER WHATSOEVER to coerce someone into buying their books.
Steve Jobs even said that it MAY have turned out that Amazon was right and $9.99 was the best price for ebooks. What the threat of Apple's entry into the business did was give the publishers the power to TRY and set a higher price.
By "TRY" you realize that just pricing a book at $14.99 does not mean it will SELL (in sufficient quantities). Market forces have not been thwarted. There are a near infinite supply of ebooks at all prices from free on up. If a customer bought a book at $14.99, they were not "harmed"...they made a choice that they valued the price for the book that was offered.
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One thing I did forget to mention...geo-restrictions. It was enforced because of agency and people who had legally bought eBooks outside of their home country no longer had access to them. How's that for causing harm to the consumer? Why is it I can order a pBook on Amazon.co.uk and have it sent here in the US yet the same book as an eBook, I am not allowed to buy because I am not in the UK. This just smacks of stupidity because it is.
I know people didn't have to buy at the higher prices, but it's like smoking, it's an addiction and people pay for their addictions. The problem is that American MR users are only a very small portion of the population of America. So getting the population of America to stop buying books from agency publishers wasn't going to happen. I wish it did so the agency publishers would have had to give up agency to get sales back.