[darryl]

@pwalker8. An interesting discussion. Some observations on your observations.

Firstly, though there are plenty of lower quality works, Indies do not constitute a slush pile. There are many works of excellent quality. There have been other threads, including one I started, about selecting Indie Books. I find that by following an elementary process the Indie books that I tend to read now are of a comparable quality to the tradpub books I used to read. At least in my view, tradpub's gatekeeping function too often had little to do with quality. Personally I feel I'm doing a much better job of it myself with minimal effort. It is only if you pick almost at random that tradpub seems to have a real advantage. Of course, I read much more fiction than non-fiction and your experience which as I seem to recall is reading mainly non-fiction may differ. If tradpub wants to charge higher prices they must truly offer better quality and what readers want, not just the illusion of it. Our common ground on this issue to the extent there is any is that publishers could do a much better job without the penny pinchers you referred to.

I think a race to the bottom as generally used is more than simply commodity pricing. Books are, after all, commodities, as Amazon's success seems to establish clearly. It connotes effectively a price war with little regard for quality. Amazon seems to have set an optimal price range within which sales and overall revenue are maximised, based on its own data. It leaves the actual pricing within this range to authors and publishers, and even allows them to set prices outside of that range but at some financial disadvantage. The existence of this range and a minimum well above zero indicated Amazon does not want a race to the bottom. And it gives new authors a chance to price realistically though the larger publishers do not seem to allow their authors to take advantage of this. Interestingly, some of the new, more innovative publishers do. Amazon's own imprints price their new releases below the $9.99 the Big 5 so hates, and I would hazard a guess they are making good money on them.

Occasionally I will read on a tablet or phone if caught without my reader. The Kindle app runs well on Android and IOS. Amazon offers the best "discoverability" available right now for readers, though this is an area which is continually improving. Nothing lasts forever, but I see no sign of Amazon losing its dominance in this area.