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Originally Posted by rhadin
I wonder why there is such angst here on MR about some publishers and authors wanting to charge more than other publishers and authors? Seems to me the answer is not Amazon's way but the marketplace way: don't buy a book that costs more than you want to pay. If enough people refuse to pay the price, the price will be lowered. That's how capitalism is supposed to work.
But if you feel you have to bring everything down to the lowest common denominator as determined by Amazon, then why not apply this across the board? Why not start agitating that all automobiles be sold for $25,000 or less. After all, a Rolls Royce will get you from point A to point B just like a Yugo. And let's insist that Apple not sell any of its products for more than the price of the least expensive computer or smartphone. After all, there is nothing special about how Apple crunches numbers or places a telephone call -- it uses the same networks as non-Apple products.
Bottom line is that I find these diatribes against the BPHs and the prices they want to charge as ill-conceived. There is nothing god-like about Amazon's price capping and no reason why any publisher should adhere to it. Similarly, there is nothing god-like about the books the BPHs publish and no reason why Amazon should sell them.
Let the market work as it should, and if you are unwilling to do that, at least be consistent and require all manufacturers and products to be sold at a price that is equal to but not higher than that of any of its competitors. After all, a TV is a TV.
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Well, unrestrained capitalism allows pricing fixing conspiracies, which has anticompetitive affects that tend to drive up prices. So despite being able to charge whatever price you like in most capitalist markets, there are controls (e.g., laws against price-fixing conspiracies) that try and prevent anticompetitive behaviour. It's not enough to simply not buy a book where there's price fixing rigging the game.
I think the following quote from the author addresses the argument in your first paragraph:
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The weaker reading of Coll’s statement — there’s always something to read for free, so no whining if you have to wait a year to get hold of Piketty’s “Capital” or Strayed’s “Wild”— is an odd underestimation of the importance of reading from someone who cares about writing. Reading is especially important when a book comes along and synchronizes public conversation; the publishers’ preferred pricing model—wait a year for the cheap copy—means that people who can only afford the paperback can’t be part of that conversation.
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The middle paragraphs in your post are more strawman than anything. I don't think anyone is saying that all things should be cheap, and it's certainly not the argument of the article that's the subject of this thread. Complaining that people should let the market just work also seems strange when that would seem to be an argument for Amazon to sell books for whatever price they like and negotiate whatever price they like with their suppliers (i.e., the publishers in the case of books).
One of the more interesting points of the article was that most people attacking Amazon aren't spending much time defending the big publishers because the big publishers are hard to defend. That certainly seems to be the case for your post.