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Originally Posted by kilron
there's no anti-trust issues in agency pricing... [snip]... period...
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I don't know if there are anti-trust issues or not. However, the nature of copyright law is that an author, and by extention their publisher, are granted a monopoly. If Amazon chose to sue on the basis that an "agency pricing" scheme harmed the public because of the monopoly then they may have an argument. Then again, maybe they wouldn't. Nobody can know unless it is tried, and it doesn't look like Amazon will do this. Upon reflection, I doubt there is an anti-trust issue here, but I don't think it is cut and dried.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kilron
What you leave out in explaining agency pricing vs. retail pricing is that neither of those was explicitly what amazon was doing with their kindle ebooks. in short though, they were more or less doing agency pricing, but with the percentages flipped so that amazon kept 70%, and also dictated pricing, thus completely screwing the publishers...
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Your understanding of Amazon's business model is simply wrong. Amazon does not keep 70% of ebook sales (or any sales). That's why people were laughing at you. Amazon was paying self-publishers, and tiny publishers, 30% of the
list price. Amazon then discounted this
list price by 20% and sold it to the public. On average this gave self-publishers and tiny publishers a 45% cut and Amazon a 55% cut.
In the case of large publishers like Macmillan things worked differently. Amazon paid them 50% of the list price. Then Amazon sold it for $9.99 which is less than they had paid for the book. Amazon did this to help create the ebook market. What this means is that the publishers where getting 100% of the profits on ebooks based on hardcover prices. So far from "screwing" the publishers, Amazon wasn't even asking them to contribute in helping to establish the ebook market.