Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
I would also point out that Apple presented evidence in court that the ebook prices actually went down across the board. It was only a select few (i.e. the best seller type books that Amazon was pricing at $9.99) that actually went up. This is part of their appeal.
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I'm sure there were many titles whose prices were largely unaffected by Agency pricing. I'd even be willing to stipulate that it's
possible that the number of titles that sold for nearly the same price before and after agency outnumbers the number of titles that saw a sharp increase in price after agency. Maybe it even outnumbers them
by far.
The problem is ... it's stupid to think of it in those terms (per title). The prices went up on ebooks that consumers were
buying by the truck-load. In droves. Scads. They stayed the same, or maybe—just
maybe—went down on the ebooks that consumers WEREN'T buying. Well la de da. Maybe the average price people were
spending per ebook went down during agency, too. Wouldn't that be horribly relevant? Statistics are fun.
The point is: the books that the
most consumers bought the
most of (the titles that the publisher's
themselves hung their financial hats on, and built their catalogs and release calendars around), cost them more after agency went into effect the first time. The rest is hand-waving. Who cares if millions of titles that were available and selling in dribs and drabs were unaffected by agency? The prices on ebooks the public wanted to buy went up. Because of agency.
Do they actually have the hubris to include the explosion of sales of lower priced indie ebooks (whose sales took off during agency's run-up) in the whole "consumer prices actually went down across the board" nonsense? I could see them doing that.