Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffR
Yes you are right. So £9.99 inc. 20% VAT is about £8.33 excl. VAT.
But £8.33 is still more than £6.99 so the same point applies: Amazon has a lower price cap in the US than in the UK, favouring US customers over UK customers.
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Amazon's price bounds at the low end are related (at least in part) to their cost of doing business: It costs them the same to list and deliver a $0.99 title as a $10 title but the revenue generated is lower. So it isn't exactly shocking that they would want to at least slightly discourage rock-bottom pricing. They also discourage perma-free as much as competitive pressures let them.
(It could be that the cost of running Kindle UK is a certain percent higher than the US operation and they are baking that into the recommended pricing structure.)
They also, subtly, encourage higher Indie pricing through their price suggestion tool which reportedly suggests slightly higher prices about two thirds of the time and lower prices about a third, typically depending on genre or category. But they do that globally and quietly, on a title by title basis.
What Amazon doesn't do is publicly tell publishers to single out specific markets for price discrimination.
Not quite the same thing.