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> I thought that all Amazon was saying was "You know the $10-15 range you wanted to price eBooks at? You can't do that." What do you mean by "all Amazon was sa

> I thought that all Amazon was saying was "You know the $10-15 range you wanted to price eBooks at? You can't do that." What do you mean by "all Amazon was saying"? That's the crux of the issue: whether publishers will allow themselves to be told by Amazon that they cannot sell over a certain price in their market, or whether they will be allowed to sell at whatever prices they choose. It's a fundamental question about how the online book market, so dominated by Amazon, will work. Your second paragraph doesn't have a clear question; what exactly do you want to understand? I'll try anyway: The marginal cost of producing eBooks doesn't really effect the price-fixing problem. The OP's point is that publishers need the flexibility to try out pricing schemes on the Amazon marketplace to discover what works, but Amazon won't let them. Ultimately, he claims, this will lead to worse results for the consumer because Amazon will be an inefficient marketplace due to the inability of the publishers to recoup costs on books with high initial prices which they can then follow with low prices later.

skolor 17y ago
The "All Amazon was saying" is because, reading the article with little-to-no outside information about the situation, the author makes it sound like Amazon isn't setting a price ceiling, but an absolute price. I was trying to verify that that was the case, since the article seems to be saying that the only price point will be $9.99. I seem to remember a price point being thrown around in one of the threads here that The Publisher/Author share 30% of the price of the book, the distributor takes ~40%, and the marketplace (Amazon, bookstore) takes 30%. From what I've read from these posts, it seems like the Publishers were fighting over the wrong thing entirely. If Amazon is acting like both Distributor and Marketplace, they currently take 70% of the sale price of an eBook. Why are Publishers arguing about the total price, rather than their cut of it? Looking at the recent move, Amazon now offering 70% to the publisher, with the requirement that they get the lowest price point, and that that price point is less than $10, it seems like that should have been what the publishers were fighting for the entire time. If both distribution and selling of the book are being by the same company, for the same effort as just selling the book, there's no real reason for them to be double-dipping and taking that huge of a portion of the sale price.

skolor 17y ago

The "All Amazon was saying" is because, reading the article with little-to-no outside information about the situation, the author makes it sound like Amazon isn't setting a price ceiling, but an absolute price. I was trying to verify that that was the case, since the article seems to be saying that the only price point will be $9.99. I seem to remember a price point being thrown around in one of the threads here that The Publisher/Author share 30% of the price of the book, the distributor takes ~40%, and the marketplace (Amazon, bookstore) takes 30%. From what I've read from these posts, it seems like the Publishers were fighting over the wrong thing entirely. If Amazon is acting like both Distributor and Marketplace, they currently take 70% of the sale price of an eBook. Why are Publishers arguing about the total price, rather than their cut of it? Looking at the recent move, Amazon now offering 70% to the publisher, with the requirement that they get the lowest price point, and that that price point is less than $10, it seems like that should have been what the publishers were fighting for the entire time. If both distribution and selling of the book are being by the same company, for the same effort as just selling the book, there's no real reason for them to be double-dipping and taking that huge of a portion of the sale price.