Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
Exactly and don't expect it to get better if the big bully MacMillan gets their way. They don't even seem to want to sell ebooks. This move by them is flat out protectionism of their print business.
What floors me is that in the current model it is only Amazon that is losing money, not the publishers, not the authors.  |
While Amazon is definitely losing money on bestsellers, I don't think that's the whole story. Amazon has a corporate history of following through on long term strategies and I think that's the case here. What I think they are doing by selling best sellers at less than wholesale is
spending money to support a business strategy.
They want total or near-total dominance of the ebook and reader industry at least in the US and are willing to spend money to get it. Their eventual business goal has to be to move the ebook division into profit; whether that be through lowering wholesale costs, raising prices, increasing sales overall to cover loss leaders, or any other tactic they choose to employ.
Macmillan fought back because they don't want to end up in the same boat as a Wal-mart supplier.
As for bullying, the only bullying tactic involved here was the removal of buy buttons: and that was Amazon's doing. The rest was all negotiations.
Macmillan is by no means perfect, but just as wanting to raise prices isn't intrinsically evil (I don't like it but that doesn't make it evil), that doesn't mean that Amazon's action should get a free pass.
Amazon tried to bully Macmillan, authors, and consumers when they removed the buy buttons.