Quote:
Originally Posted by djulian
As I was wandering through B&N last night (and remembering that I had a new Paperwhite arriving today), I began to think, If Amazon would offer to replace all a person's Nook books with Kindle books in exchange for that person's Nook and the purchase of a new Kindle, I think they would probably destroy the Nook.
So, I imagine the answer is pretty simple, but is there any reason Amazon or B&N couldn't do this to each other? It's a bit like TMobile offering to give you a remarkable deal if you come in with an unlocked AT&T phone.
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As others have suggested, this could be expensive for the retailer, as each publisher would want to be paid for each book they duplicated. Imagine if the reader had one hundred books and, on average, the publisher's royalty would be three dollars per book. That's three hundred dollars the retailer has to pay out. That's not lost revenue. That's actual cash out of the bank account. A hundred books is a small library, but enough to make a user reluctant to toss it all away, but what about readers with hundreds or thousands of books? Given that Amazon, for example, makes little on the hardware and often has discounts on the books, they might need the reader to purchase hundreds of books before they actually turn a profit on that three-hundred dollar outlay.
They'd be better off offering, to use your example, Nook owners a three-hundred dollar credit on their Amazon account in exchange for their Nook. It would actually cost them less.
Trying something like this might run up against the law, however, as an unfair trade practice. Absorbing huge losses to squeeze out competitors and try to further dominate the market may not please regulators.