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Originally Posted by HarryT
I don't understand how agency pricing could keep books out of a store. Can you elaborate, please?
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Originally Posted by MikeB1972
BooksOnBoard lost all agency titles because all contracts had to be renegotiated with the switch to agency (Took a good 3 months for BOB to get them back on the site).
BOB and fictionwise at least would have had to make a fair bit of changes to their websites as well as none of their discounts or loyalty rewards were allowed on agency titles.
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Yes, everything had to be renegotiated and it took months for stores to get the titles back. Some never got them all back. At the time the head of BoB talked about it quite a bit, but I don't recall all the details.
Here's something from when BoB closed...
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Livolsi has been critical of how the switch to the agency pricing model was implemented from the beginning and voiced complaints that it was organized strictly to benefit the big retail players and “devastated,” independent e-book sellers. He pointed to the lingering impact of the switch to agency pricing in 2010, a switch he said severely impacted indie e-book retailers because it removed Big Six titles—the switch was sudden and included major changes in metadata and delivery that severely affected e-book distributors—from his inventory. Indeed LiVolsi said he lost access to thousands of titles, some for more than a year, because of the Agency Model switch, and in the process he said, “we lost 70% of our customers.”
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http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...ook-sales.html
I don't think the rewards stuff was a hold up as both had always had some titles not eligible for rebates/rewards. All they had to do was agree to no rewards on those titles. The sites did have to do some work to facilitate collecting sales tax for states outside their home locations though (there are thousands when adding in not just state, but county & municipality for some areas).