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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Why self-published authors should side with Hachette
The above makes the blazingly obvious argument that the higher the Big 5 price for a book, the more room indie authors have to charge less and still do reasonably well.
What would really kill indie would be for Amazon to not only drive down Big 5 prices, but also forbid sale of DRM'd books. Then, indie authors would lose not only much of the price incentive, but also those readers who choose indie to avoid DRM.
A weakness of my link is that if Amazon, relatively speaking, wins this negotiation, and a poorer Hachette starts producing lower quality books, that could help indie authors by reducing big publisher competition. But I'm not sure anyone here, other than me, thinks there is significant risk of such a quality decline. And I think it would mostly be seen with non-fiction, due to the higher cost of travel and research.
So indie fiction authors would, on balance, lose big if the Big 5 loses.
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I seem to remember a lot nonsense coming from Salon.com about the ebook world.
In this article they rehashed this wonderful gem:
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Last year, a federal court in New York ruled that five houses, Hachette included, had illegally colluded to change all of their e-book sales arrangements to something called the agency model, which would allow them to control the prices at which their titles are sold.
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I suspect them of making up whatever it takes to put down Amazon and stir up trouble with indies.
The people who buy indie books will continue to do so as long as they are cheaper than Big 5 books -- which they still will be. And anti-DRMniks will have such a sour taste in their mouth about the publishers' past actions that they will avoid the Big 5 on instinct; also, they have gotten into the pattern of buying indies, why stop?
Unless of course Hachette is going to price-match all those indies. Not happening. We may see Big 5 books dropping to the $9.99 price point for new releases, dropping to $6-7 over time, but indie prices tend to be lower already.