Did the Big 5 Shoot their own foot with demanding the return of Agency Pricing?

[dickloraine]

Originally Posted by Rizla

So this isn't true?

As far as I know, they didn't change what they were doing. But sells shifting from ebooks to paper books means a loss to the publishers, since the profit on ebooks is much higher than on paper books. Another thing, that makes their actions questionable. Why push for the lower profit market? Only out of fear to devalue the price of books? Believing the whole market of books would not grow enough? Fear of losing control? Acting out of fear/emotions was never a good practice.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

As far as I know, they didn't change what they were doing. But sells shifting from ebooks to paper books means a loss to the publishers, since the profit on ebooks is much higher than on paper books. Another thing, that makes their actions questionable. Why push for the lower profit market? Only out of fear to devalue the price of books? Believing the whole market of books would not grow enough? Fear of losing control? Acting out of fear/emotions was never a good practice.

Fear of piracy. It's completely impractical to pirate paper books.

(Yes you can scan, but the Big 5 are thinking about physical copies.)

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Fear of piracy. It's completely impractical to pirate paper books.

(Yes you can scan, but the Big 5 are thinking about physical copies.)

Agreed and one other little problem with that thinking. I can pick up paper copies for anywhere from 10 cents to 1 dollar any day of the week.
Heck I picked up a hardcover of Inferno for 49 cents less than 2 weeks after it came out.
I love the thrift stores.

[GeoffR]

There are still ways for retailers to offer discounts on agency titles, they just need to do it in a way that doesn't change the book price set by the publisher.

One way is to offer some sort of after-sale reward, so the customer pays the price set by the publisher but gets a reward from the retailer proportional to the price paid. (e.g. Kobo have their Super Points scheme, Sainsburys give Nectar Points.) There is nothing to stop other retailers competing to offer larger rewards.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Fear of piracy. It's completely impractical to pirate paper books.

(Yes you can scan, but the Big 5 are thinking about physical copies.)

Intellectually, that is like saying that it is impractical to pirate handbags, or shoes, or watches.
You might want to reconsider.

Does it require more resources than pirating an electronic file? Yes.
But it absolutely is financially viable.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

One way is to offer some sort of after-sale reward, so the customer pays the price set by the publisher but gets a reward from the retailer proportional to the price paid. (e.g. Kobo have their Super Points scheme, Sainsburys give Nectar Points.) There is nothing to stop other retailers competing to offer larger rewards.

They can offer rewards, but those rewards can't then be used in turn on Agency books. Unless the publishers the one doing the program . For instance Harlequin has a points program which can be used to get Harlequin and Avon (HarperCollins) titles for free, but when HC bought Harlequin and turned them Agency AllRomance/OmniLit had to stop including them in their buy 10 get 1 and rebate rewards programs.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

They can offer rewards, but those rewards can't then be used in turn on Agency books.

That depends on the reward scheme: Sainsburys give Nectar points when you buy a Hachette ebook, and you can use your accumulated Nectar points to buy Hachette ebooks too.

[bgalbrecht]

When Amazon was resisting agency pricing, they had not clearly won the reader wars, B&N and Sony still had substantial market share. Amazon was willing took take smaller profit on their ebooks, along with the lock-in the manufacturers gave them by requiring DRM, and their superior ebook buying experience compared to their competitors' websites to become the defacto standard ebook platform. Now that they have a clear majority of ebook readers that with never go away unless the publishers force all ebooks to be sold in a standard format that can be read by any dedicated ebook reader (and maybe not even then), there is no reason for Amazon to do any ebook discounting on their own.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

When Amazon was resisting agency pricing, they had not clearly won the reader wars, B&N and Sony still had substantial market share. Amazon was willing took take smaller profit on their ebooks, along with the lock-in the manufacturers gave them by requiring DRM, and their superior ebook buying experience compared to their competitors' websites to become the defacto standard ebook platform. Now that they have a clear majority of ebook readers that with never go away unless the publishers force all ebooks to be sold in a standard format that can be read by any dedicated ebook reader (and maybe not even then), there is no reason for Amazon to do any ebook discounting on their own.

Amazon doesn't have "a clear majority of ebook readers that with never go away."
All that would be needed to make say...Smashwords competitive would be an in depth keyword system to enable more functional content searches.

Sites like Baka-Updates implement that and Baka-Updates isn't even selling a product.

Amazon's dominance is fueled by competitor incompetence.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Fear of piracy. It's completely impractical to pirate paper books.

(Yes you can scan, but the Big 5 are thinking about physical copies.)

Actually, there are places where pbook piracy (in actual print) is not only practical but very profitable:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/gal...k-pirates-peru

More, the Manhattan mafia itself has its roots in the "land pirates" of the 19th century whose entire business model was about buying books in London at launch, shipping them to NY asap, and publishing unauthorized editions en masse. Very profitable. British publishers reciprocated but Dickens and Kipling, et al were more bankable in the US than Emerson, Hawthorne, etc were in England.

The english authors were far from amused. Livid was an understatement. Kipling for one spent a lot of time looking for a "solution".

Here's his tale of woe:

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/pape...rdspirates.htm

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Actually, there are places where pbook piracy (in actual print) is not only practical but very profitable:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/gal...k-pirates-peru

More, the Manhattan mafia itself has its roots in the "land pirates" of the 19th century whose entire business model was about buying books in London at launch, shipping them to NY asap, and publishing unauthorized editions en masse. Very profitable. British publishers reciprocated but Dickens and Kipling, et al were more bankable in the US than Emerson, Hawthorne, etc were in England.

The english authors were far from amused. Livid was an understatement. Kipling for one spent a lot of time looking for a "solution".

Here's his tale of woe:

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/pape...rdspirates.htm

Dickens was absolutely furious about piracy of his books in the US.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Phogg

Amazon's dominance is fueled by competitor incompetence.

No, it's fuelled by huge investment in infrastructure that would be very difficult for any competitor to match. The reason Amazon never declare a profit is that they plough back all their revenue into infrastructure projects.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Phogg

Amazon's dominance is fueled by competitor incompetence.

...and the BPHs hurting their competitors and driving many of them out of business.

Even now: higher ebook prices driving BPH ebook sales to print? Well, Amazon sells print. Kobo, Google, and Apple don't. B&N does but their website issues negate any advantage of the shift.

Plus, as documented clearly last fall, Amazon competitors rely on BPH ebooks more than Amazon for a variety of reasons so moving sales from ebook to pbook hurts Amazon competitors more than Amazon. Add in that ebook shoppers are already online and the logical place to buy pbooks if they are cheaper than ebooks is online. And who dominates online pbook sales? Amazon.

The ostensible reason for the BPH's six year war on Amazon is that they don't want to be dependent on Amazon for sales yet everything they've done since october 2009 has only strengthened Amazon and weakened and destroyed their competitors.

With enemies like that one hardly needs allies.

"READY. FIRE! AIM."

[fjtorres]

The AAP reporting system isn't the fastest so they just released their member's October 2015 sales numbers:

http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/0...revenues-down/

With two months to go, their ebook losses stood at over 12% and their "gains", driven by adult coloring books, stood at 0.5%.

No word on the state of their feet wounds.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

With two months to go, their ebook losses stood at over 12% and their "gains", driven by adult coloring books, stood at 0.5%.

Adult colouring books? That's a new one on me!