Thread: Amazon vs. Hachette Update - It's About Price
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Old 08-03-2014, 10:31 AM   #199
eschwartz
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin View Post
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.
Oh. Em. Gee.

You're right, I'm sorry, we are all communists because we support Amazon. Now let me just reflexively shoot off my own head in disgust...

Um, no?

Amazon is not proposing to force the BWMs ( darryl) to do anything, they are merely offering a recommendation that Hachette come to a mutually-acceptable arrangement to start pricing ebooks at an advisory $9.99 cap

The BWMs are more than welcome to accept Amazon's other offer to continue the wholesale model of charging Amazon based on a $14.99 list price (dropping over time as TPB and MMPB enters the scene) and having Amazon discount it as they see fit. Hachette doesn't want to, so now we are seeing a magical concept called "negotiation", where oddly enough, both parties get to have opinions and they have to agree which one to use.
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