Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
And the Agency pricing scheme, that was put into effect at the time of the Apple/Big Six collusion, is now the industry standard.
The Big Five publishers are not basing their prices on the "market" – they're basing them on what they want to charge. In their minds, keeping the prices up for eBooks helps the sales of paper books. So it's still collusion. It's pretty obvious when Amazon sells independent books for much, much cheaper than those that are priced by the Big Five.
Example ... I've just finished reading The Silmarillion (after years of not reading it while being a big fan of Tolkien's books). I thought I might want to add it to my book collection (the copy I read was borrowed from the library via Overdrive). Here are the prices in the "competitive" eBook market.
Amazon – $9.99
Barnes & Noble – $9.99
Google Play Store – $9.99
Kobo – $9.99
Apple iTunes – $9.99
Not that I think this is an unreasonable price, but it would be nice to see SOME separation (if only by 50¢).
Nope. Prices for Iron Man DVDs ...
Amazon – $7.99
Best Buy – $9.99
Target – $7.99
Barnes & Noble – $15.14
Walmart – $9.83
This is what COMPETITION looks like.
"Funny" when these books are sold by the Colluding Five. When they're sold by Amazon or an independent, not so much.
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Amazon tells me that both the Prime Video and Blu-Ray versions of Iron Man are $19.99 as I said.
https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Man-Blu-...n%3A2650305011
Publishers compete with each other. Different books are priced at different price points. That's competition. If you don't like the price point of the Silmarillion (the first hard back I ever bought and the first book I ever pre-ordered. I still have my first edition copy), then buy a different book at a lower price point.
I get that you consider agency to be some great evil, but consider that Amazon was already raising their prices quite a bit before agreeing to agency. Once they had their market share, they had no reason to keep prices down.