pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks Um. Goodness. Traditionally, publishers set a wholesale price and a "suggested" cover pric

pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks Um. Goodness. Traditionally, publishers set a wholesale price and a "suggested" cover price. Retailers set the retail price, what the customer is actually going to pay -- but the royalties paid to authors are based on the publisher's suggested cover price. If the book lists for $24.95 and the author's contract stipulates 17% royalties on hardcovers, it doesn't matter if you, the consumer, pays $24.95, $18.75 or 25¢ -- the author is going to get $4.24. Amazon, like Walmart, can afford to price physical books at or even below wholesale price, because they're making the money up in other ways. B&N and most other booksellers can't compete on price with Amazon because they can't do that. Amazon has long been weirdly close to the old joke of "we lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume"; the vast majority of their profit comes from AWS. Also, B&N was actually selling books online before the consumer internet, via Prodigy. They were selling on the web by 1997, and the Nook ebook reader was introduced in 2009, only two years after the Kindle. Whatever their historic and current faults have been, being entirely ignorant of the electronic world isn't really one of them.