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Originally Posted by caleb72
Is Amazon actually fighting agency pricing at the moment? Amazon is always the company mentioned a thousand times in every reference to agency pricing and the DOJ law suit etc.. but are they currently making any statements one way or the other?
Just curious because most of the commentary I see is coming from other sources.
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Well, first off, I think mentioning Amazon's actions as defense for the DOJ misses the point; Amazon's not on trial but the publisher's after all.
As for Amazon fighting Agency Pricing, depends on what you mean by fighting.
Right now, Amazon is earning from Agency Pricing (at least from the sale of eBooks; we don't know if Kindles are loss-leaders or actually churning out a profit from them).
Before Amazon switched to Agency Pricing (and giving publishers the 70% royalty option) for the Big Six, they did fight tooth-and-nail against it. Macmillan (
http://us.macmillan.com/NewsDetails.aspx?id=18537) was one of the first publishers negotiating to do so and Amazon had a "glitch" where all Macmillan titles suddenly disappeared from their store over the weekend (and around a week for everything to return to normal).
Other publishers selling their eBooks on Amazon are still under the wholesale model (
http://mhpbooks.com/done_do-indies-want-agency-terms/).
It's also contrary to the rest of Amazon's business system which follows the wholesale model (although they've also proven time and again that they're willing to sell products at a loss in exchange for future consumer loyalty).
But if you're asking whether recently, they've had any open propaganda to switch back to the previous model, then no.