Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
The EU is investigating Amazon's promotion and pricing structures. KDP select, Amazon's own titles and Kindle Unlimited are predatory and anti-competitive.
.
|
Uh, sorry, but no.
1- The EU is investigating Amazon Merchant services, not anything else.
The complaints relate to their house brand products (Amazon Basics, etc) versus the offerings of other vendors selling similar products and how Amazon uses sales data to decide which products to offer as house brand items.
2- KDP SELECT and KINDLE UNLIMITED are clearly separate from the KDP BASIC. They are voluntary, limited, and easy to get out of. And since KU payouts are for *rentals* they can't be compared to sales. It's a service, not a product. Any comparison needs to be to other rental services, like Scribd, not dales at Nook or Kobo. SELECT existed for years with minimal success until KU came out.
3- Anti-competitive means doing something specific to avoid competition (like, ahem, price fixing), it does *not* include doing things better. If Amazon were actually doing anything truly anticompetitive the horde of amazon haters in publishing would've been all over them years ago. Think about it. Just remember all the lawsuits against Microsoft after the judge named them "monopolists"? Where are the Amazon "anti-competitive" lawsuits? THE ABA sued B&N and Borders in tbe 90's. The AG sued Google. Publishers sue each other and authors all the time. But for all the charges they throw at amazon they never act.
4- And predatory pricing has a legal meaning: pricing low, below cost, losing money to kill off competitors and *then* raising prices. So far, Amazon hasn't raised prices and any dead competitors didn't die of low prices but other demonstrated causes. Most typically, mismanagement. Again, no lzwsuits or even FTC investigations. The DOJ looked into their publishing business and found that Amazon never lost money selling books. And again, civil predatory pricing lawsuits aren't unheard, though the cheaper way is to complain to government.
5- Amazon Publishing is a story all unto itself. They are (mostly) exclusive to Kindle and AmazonBooks because, even though they are available to everybody via Ingram distribution, B&N and the other bookstores refuse to stock them. The books are inherently quite good (especially their translated international titles, an area where none of the big publishers bothers with) and get high ranking because there's nowhere else to buy them. As for their pricing, pbooks are priced like any other tradpub. eBooks were originally priced at wholesale rates (like pre-agency tradpub), about 50% of print, but over time have trended lower and now sell at a high Indie price ($5) which is competitive with other independent prices.
6- The one area where AmazonPublishing books have an edge is with the PRIME monthly freebies yet, Samsung had (has?) the same deal. And, most importantly to antitrust concerns, PRIME pays APub for the books they give away to subscribers (just as they pay for the music, video, and magazines in their other free services). And what they pay isn't peanuts. Authors are under NDA so the can't reveal details but general stuff leaks, like the fact that the authors get an upfront lump sum payment for those books, separate from their rental and sales royalties. Rumors have the lump sums running at about a year's salary (mid 5-figures) so their authors are quite happy. Nonetheless, there is nothing APub is doing that other big publishers couldn't do. They just don't think in terms of maximizing unit sales. The closest are/were the HARLEQUIN paperback subscription service and the BAEN monthly bundles which both offer readers substantial savings for direct, limited time sales.
All the griping you hear about Amazon publishing is because they follow a strategy of maximizing unit sales versus maximizing reader spend and letting the market set their prices. Like I said, APub ebooks sgarted out at $9-10 and slowly their base price dropped to $8,7, and 6 until at $5 their volume exploded. This is not illegal and is in fact common in most businesses.
Amazon has a big cadre of lawyers, like any big company, and they are careful not to violate any US antritrust laws, which exist to protect *consumers*. Whether the same practices apply in Europe, where antitrust exists to protect competitors, even at consumers' expense, is TBD.
Basically where B&N and Kobo and other booksellers go as far as "stock it and they will come" Amazon treats books like any other product and tries all sorts of promotions and services. Some fail (Kindle Worlds, Kindle Scout, Kindle shorts) but others succeed.
Now, which of those has Nook tried?
Kobo?
Tolino?
You can't succeed if you don't try.
The fault isn't with Amazon but with the competitors.
Simple test: go to Rauten's storefront. Loop for Kobo.
See what kind of support deep pocketed Rakuten gives Kobo.
And Kobo tries, they try to pry away indies with library availability, a subscription service, other fringe benefits.
NOOK does...?
Something as simple as a Nook store on eBay would be trivial to set up but they did nothing. And do nothing.
Stock it and (hope) they will come isn't much of a competition stategy.
Neither is floating empty accusations.
Peace.