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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
If Amazon gains too much market power, they will use it to push down the prices paid their suppliers. I think the publishers will then have less ability to accept book proposals and pay advances. By lowering Amazon's market share, agency made it more likely I'll continue to have a great choice in new well-researched and carefully edited history and journalism. This is especially important given the decline of investigate journalism in newspapers.
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The decline of newspapers is not related to selling a majority of the product to a single retailer, it's because of competition from TV and radio, which can cover highlighted news faster than newspapers (albeit in less depth), internet news portals, and the loss of classified ads to Craigslist and other internet classified ads. Between the decline in subscriptions because of all of the above, and the decline of advertising revenue because of the decline in subscriptions, there's less money to spend on investigative news.
It's funny how you argue that the publishers will have less money to pay for the acquisition of new books because Amazon will be forcing them to sell for less, considering the publishers claim that with agency pricing, they were actually getting less per ebook from Amazon than they were previously getting with the ebook wholesale model. I guess they were planning on making up the reduced revenue with the higher volume they get when they raise prices.
I hope you're not hoping for well-researched and carefully edited history and journalism from Simon & Schuster, after they only sort of recalled the debunked Benghazi expose by Dylan Davies.