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Originally Posted by charleski
Personally, I'm wary of agency pricing for books. It was tried in the UK for a long time and it didn't work. But Amazon's flat-pricing model is even worse and Amazon's levels were unsustainable.
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FYI, Amazon doesn't have a "flat pricing model," there is a wide range of prices for ebooks, old and new. (E.g. Wendy Doninger's
The Hindus: An Alternative History is $20, whereas the hardcover is $23.) The point of contention is that Amazon wants wide latitude over pricing, including the ability to steeply discount even if that means taking a loss. Publishers, on the other hand, want to protect the value of their work.
The unanswered question is whether chopping 33-50% off of the consumer price is going to lead to a commensurate increase in revenues and/or profits.
But in the end, I'm not sure all this brouhaha will really matter that much. If people are truly unwilling to buy ebooks at $15, sales will plummet and the price will get adjusted anyway. Similarly, if $10 is a truly unsustainable price, then retailers won't be able to offer it often or for long. Although I don't believe in a "perfect" price, I do think it's difficult to maintain a price that is too far from what people are willing to pay.
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Originally Posted by Pardoz
Which would be precisely why Apple offered those terms in the first place, of course. Call me a cynic, but that strikes me as the whole point of Apple's move.
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Not really. The key is that Apple is fundamentally a hardware company; selling ebooks and other digital content is primarily (though not exclusively) a means to drive iPad / iPhone / iPod sales. IMO they're not that concerned with selling ebooks; it's just a convenient "hey, look at this cool thing we can do with our snazzy hardware" approach. In contrast, selling music was the whole reason for the original iTunes Music Store, so at that time price was far more critical.