Quote:
Originally Posted by kilron
the only thing i'd disagree with is that i don't think they care at all about establishing a larger market for ebook readers. they only care about establishing a larger market for Kindles and Kindle eBooks.
|
As Adam Smith yes, it's through self-interest that people will be motivated to get the best deals they can, which will result in competition, which will drive down prices/increase quality, which will be good for everyone (including producers, who are also consumers, of different goods.)
The problem is that in a monopolized+oligarchical(!) market, retailers like Amazon can't just dump 1 supplier, because there are no directly competing products (even though most fiction novels are fairly interchangeable from an enjoyability perspective). While this last fact wouldn't matter much in a new market, where all players just had to promote 'new' authors, in the real world, because of 'author loyalty', consumers will want to be able to buy their books, which they can only do from specific publishers. And because 80% of the market is controlled by 5-6 players, this will mean that if you dump 1 of these publishers, you'll immediately be 'dumping' an enormous amount of popular authors, and pissing off a lot of consumers in a hurry. The concentration is a game-changer, here. (Sure, if MacMillan's decision is exceedingly unpopular, it may result in the gradual move of authors from MacMillan to elsewhere, but this is not really something that will have an immediate impact on their business, and as such will probably not result in management changes.)
So while people might not be 'forced' to buy products from specific
authors, when you realise that you're really talking about specific
publishers, it becomes a lot harder to say 'oh, just don't buy that author's books then', as a single publisher may control most or all of your favourite authors.
This situation is not that different from the 'anti-trust' claim that was made before, and it's only slightly less troublesome. (Though you can always stick your head in the sand and fantasize about how publishers really will differentially price different age works...)
Extrapolating from this, it's just not feasible to say that people should just stick to their principles if they're
really against this 15$ mandatory price, because the price fixing means that there is no way to find out if the demand is or isn't elastic, and, furthermore, given the rather large difference in bargaining power of MacMillan c.s. vs. individual consumers, 'principle-sticking' is very unlikely to yield any results for the consumer.