Quote:
Originally Posted by basschick
on the other hand, random house may be trying to be sure that people who care realize all their books are theirs. a handy thing for those of us who don't memorize every label but don't want to buy agency model books.
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I highly doubt it. This reorganization covers pbooks as well as ebooks, and affects everything they do.
I doubt most buyers are even aware of the new agency pricing model. I also doubt most buyers are more than marginally aware of imprints and publishers. Ask them what they read and they'll cite titles and authors. Ask them who
published the books and they might have to pull them off the shelf and look.
We'll see how the agency pricing model plays out. But the original fight between Amazon and Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, and Hachette, and the impetus to agency pricing, was about protecting the
hardcover best sellers. These are the crown jewels of publishing. They generate the most revenue and the highest profits.
Amazon was simultaneously releasing Kindle editions at the $9.99 rate with hardcover releases at $25 - $30. The Kindle editions were cuttting into hardcover sales. There are enough folks with Kindles, or with devices like the iPhone running the Kindle reader app, that HC sales were being lost.
The publishers wanted to assert control over pricing and protect their revenue stream. Aside from agency pricing, expect to see a delay between the release of the hardcover edition and the release of the ebook for the same reason there is a year's delay between the release of the hardcover and the mass market paperback.
Publishing is struggling. There are still too many books chasing too few readers, and ebooks simply add to the chaos. From the publisher's viewpoint, this isn't about greed, it's about
survival.
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Dennis