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Amazon is behaving like Walmart here: squeezing suppliers in order to provide lower prices. Walmart is certainly not good for Walmart suppliers, because if you

by ssp 17y ago

Amazon is behaving like Walmart here: squeezing suppliers in order to provide lower prices. Walmart is certainly not good for Walmart suppliers, because if you want to sell there, your profit margins will go down and down, and you will need higher and higher volume and lower and lower marginal costs. It's what Walmart does. The resulting type of product is generally known as junk. Is it good for consumers? Probably, because low prices are good, and if you don't want junk, you can go elsewhere. If the same thing eventually happens for books, then Amazon will be selling mostly cheap and trashy stuff, while other, more expensive, online bookstores will show up and get exclusive deals with better authors. In such a scenario, Patrick's comment: I will buy books from authors willing to sell them to me. I might get a little depressed over not being able to read my favorites, but if you haven’t noticed, I read a lot faster than you can possibly write and that makes me promiscuous by nature. strikes me as wrong. While you may substitute other good stuff for good stuff, you won't substitute The Duke's Boardroom Affair for Pride and Prejudice.

yummyfajitas 17y ago
Walmart sells junk because the marginal cost of junk physical goods is lower than the marginal cost of quality physical goods. In contrast, the marginal cost of an ebook is zero. The marginal cost of a paper book is independent of the quality of the book. A book makes money on volume (enough volume to cover fixed costs), not price. A junk book will simply not achieve enough volume to cover fixed costs, even in the Amazon marketplace.
patio11 17y ago
The resulting type of product is generally known as junk. I know I'm supposed to feel class disdain for poor people because their Chinese-factory-made T-shirts cost a fifth of what my name brand Chinese-factory-made T-shirts do, but my brain has never been good at mental gymnastics. It is even less good at them when I can do bitwise comparisons of the two products and be guaranteed of equality.
- ssp 17y ago
  Note that I didn't say Walmart is bad. In fact I said: 'Is it good for consumers? Probably', and I mean that. I called their goods junk, just as I'm willing to call The Duke's Boardroom Affair junk, because that's how those products are seen, even by people who buy them. That doesn't imply any disdain for people who buy Chinese-factory-made T-shirts, or people who read romance novels. (If you consider the number of people who buy Chinese-factory-made T-shirts or read romance novels, you'd have to feel disdain for an extremely large percentage of people). The point is simply that what Amazon is doing could turn them into the Walmart of bookstores, for better or worse.
  - adamc 17y ago
    Razor blades are junk? Toothpaste is junk? No. They are commodities. Wal-Mart traffics in commodities, selling them at commodity prices, squeezing suppliers but generally benefiting their customers. If MacMillan can't work out a deal with Amazon and sells their books elsewhere, bully for them. If enough publishers did that, maybe Amazon would have to capitulate. But I suspect that Patrick was right, and that most of us would just buy other books, most of the time. The reality is that there is an enormous ocean of good to great books, more than I can ever read, and Amazon's conveniences are likely more significant than which authors get published on Amazon.
mnemonicsloth 17y ago
Walmart is certainly not good for Walmart suppliers No. Wal-Mart offers suppliers enormous volume at the cost of tiny margins. Sometimes this is a bad deal for suppliers, but Wal-Mart sells the equivalent of $200 worth of stuff to every human being on this planet, every year, and has done so for some time. If this was unsustainable, it would have stopped by now. Disdain for Wal-Mart is disdain for products that have no story attached to them. Taste-makers promote this attitude -- in part by pushing narratives about how Wal-Mart hurts whoever it does business with -- because their livelihood comes from telling stories about stuff people buy.

by ssp 17y ago

yummyfajitas 17y ago

Walmart sells junk because the marginal cost of junk physical goods is lower than the marginal cost of quality physical goods. In contrast, the marginal cost of an ebook is zero. The marginal cost of a paper book is independent of the quality of the book. A book makes money on volume (enough volume to cover fixed costs), not price. A junk book will simply not achieve enough volume to cover fixed costs, even in the Amazon marketplace.

patio11 17y ago

The resulting type of product is generally known as junk. I know I'm supposed to feel class disdain for poor people because their Chinese-factory-made T-shirts cost a fifth of what my name brand Chinese-factory-made T-shirts do, but my brain has never been good at mental gymnastics. It is even less good at them when I can do bitwise comparisons of the two products and be guaranteed of equality.

ssp 17y ago
Note that I didn't say Walmart is bad. In fact I said: 'Is it good for consumers? Probably', and I mean that. I called their goods junk, just as I'm willing to call The Duke's Boardroom Affair junk, because that's how those products are seen, even by people who buy them. That doesn't imply any disdain for people who buy Chinese-factory-made T-shirts, or people who read romance novels. (If you consider the number of people who buy Chinese-factory-made T-shirts or read romance novels, you'd have to feel disdain for an extremely large percentage of people). The point is simply that what Amazon is doing could turn them into the Walmart of bookstores, for better or worse.
- adamc 17y ago
  Razor blades are junk? Toothpaste is junk? No. They are commodities. Wal-Mart traffics in commodities, selling them at commodity prices, squeezing suppliers but generally benefiting their customers. If MacMillan can't work out a deal with Amazon and sells their books elsewhere, bully for them. If enough publishers did that, maybe Amazon would have to capitulate. But I suspect that Patrick was right, and that most of us would just buy other books, most of the time. The reality is that there is an enormous ocean of good to great books, more than I can ever read, and Amazon's conveniences are likely more significant than which authors get published on Amazon.

mnemonicsloth 17y ago

Walmart is certainly not good for Walmart suppliers No. Wal-Mart offers suppliers enormous volume at the cost of tiny margins. Sometimes this is a bad deal for suppliers, but Wal-Mart sells the equivalent of $200 worth of stuff to every human being on this planet, every year, and has done so for some time. If this was unsustainable, it would have stopped by now. Disdain for Wal-Mart is disdain for products that have no story attached to them. Taste-makers promote this attitude -- in part by pushing narratives about how Wal-Mart hurts whoever it does business with -- because their livelihood comes from telling stories about stuff people buy.