Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
It's not clear how much influence Amazon will have. Publishers set wholesale prices they charge to distributors and large retailers. Amazon's leverage will be refusing to stock ebooks if they don't get the price they want. The question is how big an impact that will have on the publisher. Unless the market gets a lot larger and more robust, I suspect most publishers will say "Fine, don't stock the ebook. We aren't lowering our wholesale price."
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Five years ago a threat from Amazon such as the one you pose would mean lower prices because Amazon was a major outlet. But today the scene is different. etailers come and go because etailing is easy to set up -- just look at the number of new ebookstores that have been announced in recent months here on MR alone -- and because there are now, thanks to the Internet, multiple other outlets for the books. A publisher could just as easily sell direct or through an Asian or European ebooktailer as through Amazon.
Five years ago, warehousing was a major concern because pbooks have to be stored somewhere and warehousing incurs cost; thus, the need to placate Amazon. ebooks, OTOH, have no warehousing costs so a publisher doesn't need Amazon as an outlet if Amazon gets too demanding -- and I think publishers are wiseing up to this, as evidenced by their starting to think of producing their own ebook devices and platforms and their settling on the ePub format.
Also remember that when Amazon puts the squeeze on publishers, it really has to put the squeeze on the big publishers, the Random Houses and Hachettes, not on the small indies. It is the big publishers that will set the standard. But as it squeezes the Randoms and Hachettes, they may well squeeze back -- Amazon needs product as much as publishers need outlets; perhaps in thsi "war" the publishers, as the content providers, are in a more powerful position than Amazon if they get their act together.