Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Agency hardly shutdown loyalty programs. Unless it's written specifically in the contract (which I do not believe was the case), there is nothing that prohibits a reseller from implementing a host of tried and true loyalty programs, such as store credits or discounts. Agency simply says that the publisher sets the price and the reseller gets a percentage. Amazon could do a buy 2 get 1 free, get 10% off all purchases and that sort of thing.
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In short: no they couldn't (the part I bolded). Not if that free ebook was an agency priced title. Free is less than the dictated discount floor. Were you living under a rock during Agency, or what?
But you're twisting the issue regardless. Of course agency didn't shut down loyalty programs themselves, it just limited (severely) how much of a discount those loyalty programs could offer on agency-published titles. The fact is, those loyalty programs
regularly offered discounts that would have been
below (and often waaay below) the new agency-dictated prices.
That agency hampered a loyalty program's (or any retailer's) ability to discount Big5 ebooks is not up for debate. It did. Because that was the goal of agency after all.
There is no question that consumers who availed themselves of loyalty programs that offered big discounts, paid more for their Big5 ebooks
after agency enacted the discounting floor. Just as there is no question that the most popular, highest-volume sellers were sold by etailers at a higher price than they would have pre-agency.
The prices went up on the etitles that the publishers sold the most of... period. The titles they build their catalogs around and hang their financial hats upon; and with which they subsidize all their other pet (less profitable) projects.