Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
The Agency Price scheme determines what Amazon HAS to sell these publisher's eBooks for. They can no longer discount them on their own. Amazon already had the lion's share of eBook sales and were STILL selling eBooks for $10 UNTIL Apple and the Big Five, while colluding, talked about how they "abhorred" the Amazon $10 eBook price and how they were going to raise it to $12.99 or $14.99. Jobs announced that he would raise prices eBooks right from the beginning. So, quite bluntly, this is not an "excuse" it's just the facts. You're the one who appears to be engaging in historical "revisionism."
Can't get much clearer than this (from Cote's decision) quoting what Jobs said when introducing the iPad...
The end of $10 eBooks, engineered by Apple – not Amazon's decision.
And that was my point. I was "willing to pay" the $10 (or less, on sale) for eBooks from Amazon (never borrowed eBooks at that point) but not now with the Apple/Big Six Agency collusion pricing scheme. I still contend that the publishers would probably make more money selling eBooks for $10 because many more would buy them instead of borrowing them from the library. They've figured this out in the movie and music industry.
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Simply repeating the talking point and calling a price point a collusion price doesn't change the facts. It's been over 8 years now since the alleged collusion occurred.
Most of the publishers including the non big 5 publishers use the same pricing strategy, i.e. ebooks slightly under the normal discounted price of the current paper price (either hardback or paper depending on if the book has been released in paper). It's been that way for a number of years now. 8 years is plenty of time for the market to agree on a price point. That's what has happened with ebooks. If ebooks were too expensive for most consumers then the price point would have dropped by now.
Yea, movies sure have figured it out. The initial digital prices points for most major movies is between $15 - $20. After a time, most drop to around $10. Eventually, it falls into the under $10 range. Of course, not all. For example, Iron Man which came out in 2008, is still $20. I guess it's still popular enough to command that price point.
Funny, that's kind of what is happening with ebooks. Books that continue to sell, continue to command a premium price point (The Lord of the Ring books and Wheel of Time books are still at $10 per book), other books drop in price over time. One can buy Lord Foul's Bane for $3 in the kindle store. It has nothing to do with collusion and everything to do with what prices the market will pay.