Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
In many countries a cover price set by maker or distributor is illegal.
The way all ebook retailers (and online paper book sellers) have price set by publisher is illegal in any physical shop in UK & Ireland. I can't see why the online sellers get away with this.
|
The cover price is just the list price, pretty much all retail products have them, even if they aren't visible to the consumer. They are often higher then the actual sale price. You're thinking of the Net Book Agreement, which was industry collusion and would probably be illegal in North America as well (except Mexico, where like Europe, the publishers fix prices by law)
I think ebook prices are the same across platforms in large part because the same factors determines those price and the ease of comparing prices online. European laws on fixed prices create an incentive to maintain the same price as well. Basically, if a publisher determines the best price for a book, there is no reason for that to be different for Amazon and Kobo. Also, I don't think the platforms or the publishers put that much thought into the price of individual books. Because it is a digital product they don't have to worry about overstock.