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Originally Posted by CommonReader
Don't I love people who appoint themselves arbiters of the discussion. You are at liberty to discuss what you want but you don't own the discussion.
Anyway, I don't have an issue with the publishers. I complain about people who provide me with a valuable service wanting to make a decent profit.
The publishers have brought us the wide choice and quality of books that we enjoy today. The publishers aren't easily expendable, but Amazon is.
If Amazon were to collapse tomorrow, the reading habits of most people in the Western world wouldn't change a bit, let alone anywhere else.
Those who are supporting Amazon on MR seem to have a huge sense of entitlement. They want to read the books that are published by the publishers, but they believe that they are entitled to dictate the prices of those books. The ranting against "the elites" is basically not much more that the demand that others should offer you their work at bargain prices.
If indie publishing and Amazon's publishing are so great, then why don't you stick to those books and ignore the ones published by the major publishers?
We have heard plenty of pundits declare all sorts of business models as obsolete in the past, which are still going strong today. I don't believe in unlimited growth of ebooks to the detriment of paper books. Publishers will be around for a long time.
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I'm generally pro-Amazon, but it's not that I want to dictate the prices anyone charges for books. I simply insist on determining the price I am willing to pay. If the BPH charges too much for my tastes, I buy something from someone else, maybe an indie, maybe not.
I may believe some of their prices are out of whack with perceived value, so they would be more successful if the prices were more in line with those perceptions, but that's not the same as saying I'm entitled to lower prices.
I just won't buy it if I think the price is a rip-off, whether it's BPH or indie.