Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
I was referring to the continuing german media angst over Amazon retailing practices and "bullying" of publishers. Including recent antitrust charges from said retailers.
At 11%, in a price-fixed market, their market power is actually very limited by any rational economic analysis since they can only account for an equIvalent portion of the publisher's business. Especially in a market with single digit ebook penetration.
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Well, if Amazon's behaviour was as described, i.e. they lowered their stock, removed preorder buttons and caused longer delivery times for the books from that one publisher, their behaviour was quite possibly anticompetitive, and the antitrust charges may be quite justified under German law.
As for their market share - 11% doesn't sound like a lot, but that may very well still make Amazon the largest book retailer in Germany by a good, solid margin. Also, that's 11% of the total book market. They are apparently pressuring for higher rebates for e-books, though, where they have a 70% market share. And at that point we are well into the range where the German cartel office tends to take a dim view of shady business practices. Especially since Amazon is BOTH a publisher AND a retailer in the e-book market, so the way they treat other publishers becomes doubly interesting: The lower publisher share, and hence lower royalties, might pressure authors to abandon their publishers and publish via Amazon, where the royalty rates are higher.
The German book market may be price-fixed, but just what exactly that means for e-books isn't clear. In the same way that a paperback edition of a book can have a different price from a hardcover edition of the same book, an e-book edition of the same book can have a different price still. Now, is an ePub edition of a book sufficiently different from a Kindle edition of a book that it can have a different price, or are they considered the same edition in the eyes of the German book pricing laws? I don't think anyone has ever decisively answered that question.
And lastly, what Amazon is doing right now doesn't seem to benefit anyone but Amazon's bottom line. It probably wouldn't lead to lower e-book prices, which would benefit consumers. It certainly would lead to less money per book for authors, who aren't really known for getting rich (with a few notable exceptions). So I have a hard time cheering for them on that basis alone.