Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
I suspect Amazon isn't too unhappy with agency pricing. When they began they were willing to lose money on sales to get a good customer base. At the moment they have a huge customer base.
They did protest and fight back against agency pricing but not for long and my guess is that fight had more to do with appearance than anything real.
Of course I'm only guessing at any of this and I hope I'm wrong. I'd love to see an end to agency pricing. But I don't expect it.
Barry
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You are correct. Amazon is far from unhappy with agency. It is facilitating increases in their share of the ebook market. It is not agency per se that is the problem, and that problem is for consumers who like Big 5 ebooks rather than Amazon. Amazon doesn't care that much type of book you buy as long as you do buy. But the pricing of ebooks by the Big 5 seems to be aimed at optimising print book sales at the expense of just about everyone else, including readers and authors. As I said in a later post it may well be that Amazon will price its new ebooks without any regard to directing customers towards higher priced Windowed print versions. In this case the best indication is probably the pricing of their APub titles. Nothing, of course, is certain.
When you think further about things, it seems that we now have agency or its functional equivalent in self-pub and Indie titles (author or publisher sets price), APub titles (Amazon sets price) and of course tradpub ebooks where the Publisher has an agency agreement and sets the price. In all cases the author or publisher sets the price, not the retailer. The traditional wholesale model seems to exits only for print books. The Big 5 seem to be the main culprits when it comes to pricing ebooks high to favour print book sales and traditional windowing practices.