Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
I find it amusing the folks who think it so hard for a customer to "not buy a book they think is too expensive" expect publishers to forgo millions of dollars in revenue from their number 1 and most important retailer and just "sell their books elsewhere if they don't like Amazon's pricing".
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Or they could, of course, just let Amazon set whatever price it like for ebooks, just like it always has for pbooks, and publishers never complained that those sales were ruining the future of the publishing industry.
Publishers weren't losing money on the $9.99 bestsellers. Publishers had no evidence that those prices would eventually lead to loss of money... the public has no trouble grasping "early release sale; these prices go up when the books are no longer at the top of the charts."
Why is selling at a loss evil when it's ebooks but a reasonable marketing decision when a pbook is involved?
(I don't like Amazon. I think Amazon's business practices are predatory and deceptive and illegal in spots. However, I don't think they were breaking any laws with the $9.99 ebooks, and publishers were getting all twisted up over
lack of control, not actual economic impact. And since neither the publishers nor Apple have shown any interest in the concerns of book
readers, I'm not sympathetic to any of them.)
Publishing house options didn't stop at "they can pull their books from Amazon." They had plenty of other ways to undermine Amazon's control--offering discounts, "coupon for free or 1/2 price ebook with purchase of new pbook," setting up their own ebook store selling at a tiny markup over wholesale instead of retail. Or they could get creative. But they didn't want to get creative; they wanted to kill the ebook market, or limit it to an exotic high-tech luxury, and they based their decisions on that goal.
Over and over, they insisted on believing that every $10 ebook sale was a lost $25 hardcover sale, NOT a lost $7 paperback sale that would've waited six months or a year. Their lack of understanding of the market does not excuse collusion.