Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
We seem to have different definitions of baseline: to me, baseline is the expected price for the category. Anybody wanting to go higher would need a very good excuse.
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Basically, you want a centralized system of pricing (publishing world communism economy): The price shall be $9.99 or less unless you fill in triplicate these forms and receive special permission to sell your book for $10. And here I thought you were an advocate for the free market.
In a free market, I can set my pricing at whatever I want and either you buy or you don't buy. I don't need your permission to set my price nor do I need to give a reason/excuse.
On the one hand you oppose agency pricing imposed by the maker of the goods for sale, but on the other hand support agency pricing by the retailer of the goods. (The legal definition of agency pricing is simply that the seller of a product receives a fixed percentage of the sales price. It is not tied to a specific pricing structure, which means that price caps can be agency pricing as much as price minimums.)
After all, what is, when you get right down to it, the difference between Hachette saying I want my books sold for nothing less than $15 and Amazon saying I want your books sold for nothing more than $10 (excluding, of course, the $5 in cutoff price)?
Other than that you as a consumer would pay less with Amazon's cap, I see no difference between Hachette's agency pricing that Mobile Readers have consistently railed against and Amazon's agency pricing that the same Mobile Readers support -- that is, aside from one being proposed by the hated BPH and the other by the beloved best friend Amazon.