Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
In Nate's piece he mentions that Amazon have 25% of the US print market. The other 75% is hardly 'no competition'.
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I’m not familiar with the nate article you refer to and therefore can’t really comment on the veracity of the percent market share Amazon has. Even assuming that it is the 25% as quoted I’m not sure how relevant that might be to the broad spectrum of books being sold.
What I do know is that Amazon has been predatory in the book market by slashing prices on books that bricks and mortar stores could not compete with and now many of those bricks and mortar stores have stopped stocking those books, Amazon has started raising prices on them. Presumably to claw back some of the lost profits that their price slashing caused in the first place.
It’s noticeable that Amazon is not raising prices on the more popular best sellers where they do still have plenty of competition, presumably from that 75% of the market they don’t control.
I dislike any predatory company that tries to manipulate and monopolise a market in the way that Amazon is trying to do. It’s underhand, not good business practice and ultimately bad for consumers. Healthy competition is good.