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Originally Posted by darryl
@pwalker8. Unfortunately you are correct about the tribal aspect. I myself freely admit my leanings on these issues. Whilst I recognise my bias and mostly try to be reasonable I'm aware that I don't always succeed. As previously indicated I do think that there will always be a place for publishers, though the old model is all but dead, and those who prosper will be those who adapt and innovate. But of course in a very competitive environment there is little room for quasi-philanthropy of the type you argue occurred frequently under the old model. I like Amazon, but I would still like to see significant competition in the ebook market. However, at the moment I simply see no sign of it happening.
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I think that people have a tenancy to equate competition with cost and the race to the bottom, but that isn't necessarily so. Sure, there is a percentage of the population that is focused purely on price. However, quite a few companies have been very successful on focusing on quality and customer experience rather than being the cheapest. Companies like Apple and BMW to name two well known examples.
I suspect that over time, we will certainly have publishers who specialize in finding the best from the indie slush pile and publishing cheap books with a reasonable quality. But I think we will still be seeing publishers who successfully follow the older model of developing quality authors. There really is room for a lot of very different business models.
Where the quality model starts to fail is when the back office starts to pinch pennies. It's called penny wise and pound foolish. The other issue that the quality model has is when the decision makers don't correctly understand what their customers value. I think that someone like Jim Baen would still be a successful publisher now under the business model that he followed. He knew his audience, he knew what they wanted and he was willing to innovate.
I really don't see a race to the bottom with regards to ebook prices (or music prices for that matter). It seems to me that the market is dividing into those who want their media for free, or for a small set fee per month (think youtube and subscription mode streaming music like Pandora, Apple Music and Spotify) and those who are willing to pay to buy their favorite song or album. I don't think that ebooks will be any different.
As far as competition goes, I think there are a lot of possibilities. Apple has the platform and money that would let it expand if it wants to. Right now, I don't think that they want to. The two biggest hurdles for a major competitor in the ebook store arena are catalog and platform. They need to match Amazon's catalogue with regards to authors that readers care about. But that won't really move the needle. They will also need a platform that would give readers a reason to switch.
My thought is that better discoverablity would do the trick. Amazon has a number of issues that have been there for years and thus they are vulnerable. If I could do a search for Roger Zelazny and get a complete list of Roger Zelazny's books without a bunch of other authors that Amazon wants me to buy, that would be a huge improvement. Heck, they could even give a complete list of all Roger Zelazny's books, including those not currently available. They could do some of the things that Amazon promised but never really got around to implementing, such as notifying when a favored author has a new book, or a backlist book that is now available. Curated best new book lists. Really, there are so many things that could be done. You just have to think, what would I want as a customer.
It wouldn't work in a race to the bottom WalMart model where you push as much expense as you can to someone else, of course. I suspect that's a large reason that Amazon never really implemented much of it. The initial cost might be pretty high, but over time I think the costs would come down.