Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
Not necessarily true. The publisher and the author bear all the upfront costs and risks; the only thing Amazon bears is a bit of cyberspace. Every ebook sold by Amazon is profit to Amazon, whether the selling price be $1 or $15. That is not true for publishers or authors.
The breakeven number for a publisher might be 100,000 sales so that a profit first occurs with sale 100,001. In contrast, Amazon's first profit is with the sale of the very first unit.
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Your excellent piece of nonsense applies only to pbooks, and is thus completely irrelevant.
A pbook that costs x to make and store and ship must be sold for x+profit, and it is possible to lose money on it.
An ebook costs 0 to make and store and ship, and any price = profit.
Both have the overhead to pay off, but that is the same no matter how many sell, so the only thing that matters is maximizing revenue.
And if Amazon makes more revenue by selling more books for less per-unit cost (which they claim), the publisher gets an equivalent amount more under Agency, and under wholesale the unit price doesn't matter so they make even more.