Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Customers love being the recipient's of loss leader largess.
Think about that. How much must it have mattered for the publishers to go to war with their best customer? Have you ever asked yourself WHY it would matter to publishers? Beyond saying "why should they care, they are getting their wholesale money either way" and concluding "publishers are just stupid, if not outright evil".
Ok...I'll do the thinking for you. Your job is to try to have an open mind to UNDERSTAND from their pov (not agree, but understand).
Amazon is the most powerful book seller and they set the ENTIRE NYT Bestseller's list on sale at $9.99, which was a below wholesale price.
Whither the REST of the publisher's customers? How are they to sell those hardback books at $25 when Amazon is selling the same book as an ebook for $9.99. Why, that deal is so good that customers paid $400 for the original Kindle ereader just based on the savings they could get for the books.
Is it in the publisher's best interest for Amazon to run the rest of their customers (to a publisher, the retailer is the customer) out of business? No.
But wait. There's more. Amazon was training the market that $9.99 was the proper price for a new release book. What happens after Amazon runs the rest of the publisher's customers out of business? Will Amazon just continue to sell every NYT bestseller at a loss when there is no competition left? NO.
Amazon will turn around and tell the publisher...the proper wholesale price for new bestseller books is now $7, not $12. What could the publisher's do then? The rest of their customers are out of business and they are beholden to Amazon.
That scenario is exactly what the publishers were concerned with. Now you are free to not care about the publishers and their profit motives. You might think publishers aren't even bringing value to books and etc. etc. But at least you can credit them for having a reason for their actions.
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Yes, some people did buy a Kindle just for the cheap NYT bestsellers. However, Amazon was not selling all new ebooks at the $9.99 rate, and it was clearly a marketing drive for selling Kindles (and thanks to publishers insistence on DRM, locking them into the Amazon walled garden).
Amazon was not selling those NYT best sellers in a discounting vacuum. If you had gone to Target, Sam's Club, B&N, Borders, etc., you would have seen the $25 HC discounted to something like $15-17 dollars. At the same time, a non NYT bestseller might not be discounted at all, or discounted by a much lower amount, and the ebook may well have been priced the same as the HC.
I am sure that Amazon has been negotiating hard with the publishers to get discounts and chargebacks and promotional fees, just as all the other chain bookstores have. If the publishers give in to Amazon and give them better deals than any other retailer, and then complain that Amazon is charging too little and killing off the competition, I have no sympathy for the publishers. Amazon is only the latest retailer that is the scourge of the publishers, before that it was B&N and Borders, and B. Daltons and a few other national chains who were killing off the independent bookstores, and it was because the chain retailers were buying enough books the publishers gave them special discounts they were unwilling to give anyone else. It doesn't give the publishers the right to violate the law because they can't see the consequences of their own actions.
BTW, I have never owned a hardware Kindle, and I did not start buying ebooks from Amazon until after agency pricing went into effect. The only reason why I started buying from Amazon was because I was seeing discounted books at Amazon that were not discounted anywhere else. Either Amazon was getting special promotions from the publishers that nobody else got, or my preferred retailers were too incompetent to take advantage of the promotions (or they were keeping the difference in price). If it was the former, than the publishers are two-faced liars who are complicit in Amazon's dominance, and if it is the latter, Amazon's competition deserves to lose my business.