[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by leebase

You are correct that no one was competition to Amazon. Ergo, it was a good thing for Apple to come into the space. And no, Apple was never going to seriously unseat Amazon. But - Apple would have been a viable contender and a bulwark to give publishers some power in their negotiations with Amazon.

The thing is, before agency, we could shop around for the lowest price. Now we don't have all the options we had before. And yes, a lot of what I purchased was purchased at shops that no longer exist because they did have the lowest prices.

The publishers did not have the power individually to combat Amazon's "$9.99 for the entire NYT best seller's list". Amazon was setting in people's minds that a new book was only worth $10. The most profitable books that pay for pretty much the rest of the books that get published.

If anybody thinks the little guys would have continued to compete against Amazon on price. You are kidding yourselves. They were only able to discount against books that Amazon didn't care to dominate. It was just a matter of time before Amazon would have started pricing those book sellers out of the market. They didn't have to at first. At first, they needed a way to get people to pay $400 for a kindle to establish the ebook device market. They way they accomplished that was to sell books at $9.99 that people had been paying $25/$30 new as hard backs.

The "little guys" were doing just fine at the time until agency pricing came into being and their way of doing business was no longer viable since they could no longer discount. They had things like a book club where you joined and got discounts and points. Plus sales and such. But because of agency, none of this worked.

Of course you like $9.99 for a brand new book verses having to wait until the mass market paper back came out. Liked it so much that you paid $400 for a Kindle eInk device.

I never paid $400 for a Kindle. I went with Sony which while expensive, was still less then the Kindle.

By the time the publishers did something about it - the NEED for a $400 device was gone. Now Amazon was able to sell a $100ish device and couldn't care less that it allowed the publishers to set their own prices. The capturing of the market had already occurred.

And Amazon went on to the next part of their plan and became a publisher themselves.

You still don't get it. You make it sound liked agency was Amazon's plan. It has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH AMAZON. While Apple wanted Amazon to stop being able to put eBooks on sale. Apple & the price fix 6 did not care at all who got hurt in the process. And a number of eBook stores did get hurt and had to close.

The little boutique booksellers were never going to last. Scale is everything. Sure, niche players like Baen could still ply their trade. But mass book selling? That was always going to go to one or a couple of the biggest players.

You cannot say that. You don't know. Nobody knows. But they were still there and still doing business even with Amazon. So stop saying things that just are not true. BAEN is a publisher and not just a place to buy eBooks.