Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Not quite.
I also think that when a discounting merchant gets that much power, they are liable to use it to force down prices, which forces down quality. WalMart does it with clothing. And Amazon is attempting to gain the power that would allow it to do so it with books.
Now, if the decline in quality is more typos and uglier cover art, I don't care much personally. But if the quality decline includes lower advances against book proposals, resulting in fewer highly researched books, that's a problem. |
Why should Amazon's prefered marketing method force lower quality? In the pre Agency days Amazon paid the publishers whatever they wanted for the book then sold it with a low markup making their profit on volume. After the Agency agreement Amazon actually got more money from each sale, the publishers and authors got less and the public paid more. THAT would force lower quality books not anything Amazon did.