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Originally Posted by leebase
I said "practical" monopoly - not monopoly. Amazon had an 80% share of the ebook market. Amazon was threatening the hard back book revenue as ebooks were taking off.
Of course people want $9.99 books when the new release hard backs are $20 and more. They'd be even happier with $5 ebooks. And why not $1 ebooks at the same time the publishers hope to sell those $20 hard backs?
The price was so low that Amazon sold millions of kindles in large measure on the thought that you could save money just on the difference between the hard back and ebook price.
There is no way that the publishers were going to stand for this. All of us who buy paperback books instead of hard backs have had to wait the usual year before we can read our books. Reading a "new release" book was something only people willing to shell out the hard book price could do -- or wait in queue at the local library.
Penguin's pricing will come in line with market reality. The $9.99 price was never "market reality". That was Amazon willing to lose money to capture market share.
Lee
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The problem with this argument, though, is that very, very few hard covers sell for their list price (except for a few brick and mortar stores). Most of them are discounted significantly and it's not crushing the publishers. So now we're in the reverse situation on a lot of titles where the ebooks are significantly MORE expensive than the physical books, and there's just no way that's not ridiculous.