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Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
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 . . .
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Sounds right. I didn't mean to imply why newspapers were declining, but just to say that we need well-edited non-fiction all the more because of that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
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.
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Rather than doing what would help them in the next quarter or year, the publishers were thinking longer-term about what their industry, and literary life, would be like with a single retailer having most of the market.
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Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
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.
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No one claims every big publisher book is good. I recommend reading signed reviews before committing to any of their products, and avoiding most works of political advocacy. But I will say this for Simon & Schuster -- when the editors told the suits that the book should be pulled, it was. As for Amazon, as of tonight, they don't offer it as a Kindle eBook, but only, I believe, because Simon and Schuster won't let them. And the only review on Amazon's sales page, as of Tuesday evening, is a rave:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Embassy-Ho...+Who+Was+There
If you think Simon & Schuster's standards for book-length journalism are too low, how would you compare them to Kindle Direct Publishing?
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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Taking action in preventing the future perceived (perceived; meaning as of yet uncommitted) anti-competitive actions of company B can in no way be construed as promoting competition by Company A. That dog won't hunt.
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Not in Judge Cote's courtroom. And probably (since most appeals are unsuccessful) not in any US courtroom. I wasn't making an argument about US law, but about what's good for the quality of books -- especially non-fiction, since a shortage of good fiction seems unlikely to me.
All Apple and publishers did was to conspire to do something in the US that it's illegal for them not to do in France and Germany. This doesn't mean France and Germany are right, but it does make me wonder if it is a matter of judgment, not right and wrong.