Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
You get no debate from me about book pricing being pretty much whatever. But the publishers had established a vibrant market for new books at $25-$30 retail....allowing sellers to give 25% to 40% off as standard practice. The wholesale price was $12.50 or so.
Amazon courting their own authors and selling books on the cheap....is a completely different thing than selling the best seller list at $9.99. It’s also different than having a book or two as loss leaders. Putting the entire NYT's best sellers as loss leaders would destroy the perceived value of a new book.
And it worked. Just listen to all here who scream that $14.99 for a new release book is highway robber when $25 for a new book never was.
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Publishers were able to window and extract every cent of profit from a captive market void of competition. Nothing wrong with that. It was great for them whilst it lasted. But healthy competition from Amazon destroyed that particular business model. For my part, I say good riddance. The ability to window in this way was not some god-given right. Amazon turned a non-competitive market dominated by an oligopoly with resulting excessive prices into a competitive one. The traditional Publishers are finally learning to live with it and, as I have posted previously, are experimenting rationally with prices.