Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
I'm rather sick of people advertising books as Free, when for an ordinary Amazon customer they are not.
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Two things to remember:
1- the bulk of Amazon's customers *aren't* ordinary "drive up" customers. They will service them, often cheaper than other sites (but not always) but that is not who they target and they haven't since 2005. Amazon is all about PRIME. That is 150M accounts at the latest (early 2020, pre lockdowns) and since the account rules *encourage* sharing within a family (sibling, for example) the number of people with access to Prime perks is easily double or triple. Their business model is no different from Costco, Sams, and the other membership retailers.
2- The whole point of serving non-members (which other membership retailers don't always do) is to *highlight* the differences to get non-members to become members.
Consider that Amazon spends $10B a year on shipping but PRIME brings in $15-18B in subscription fees alone. That means they have $6B to spend on buying ebooks for members, licensing music, video, and games, paying for original movies and video series, and plain profit.
Plus whatever profit they make off sales.
So, what incentive do they have to be extra nice to non-members?
Subscriptions are a powerful business model, just ask Netflix and Microsoft. Kobo is trying to get into that game for a reason.
If the PRIME perks aren't enough induce you to subscribe then you're not likely to spend enough to be worth giving access to the perks. (TINSTAAFL!)
Their aim is making money, after all.