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Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
I do agree with John that when discounting was no longer allowed on big 6 it hurt vendors terribly (and Amazon associates because those are now the deals people look for and there are less of them). It has also hurt Kobo and is probably the main reason they have cut back on coupons so much (although there is always a tendency to run something like that for a time and the offload that expense back on publishers or authors -- that's a natural flow. But they probably had huge cost hits on their coupons. Notice that they've gone to a points system/membership model and some of those points can be used on publisher books as far as I know.)
It's a tough market!
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It never needed to be a tough market. Agency pricing never needed to happen. I bought a lot of eBooks from BooksOnBoard & Fictionwise. Then Apple got involved in eBooks and both shops had to stop their successful business models. They had nothing special to offer after that. They no longer could compete. So yes, I do think that Apple and the BPHs have caused the closure of a lot of little eBook shops. They did it to level the playing field against Amazon and failed very badly. They only made Amazon stronger. What they should have done once the realized they were not going to take down Amazon was to abandon agency pricing.