ebook publishers alledgedly team up against amazon

[charlesr]

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/11/2941053/inside-the-dojs-ebook-price-fixing-case-against-apple-an-analysis

Putting aside the fact that the headlines all concentrate on Apple instead of the publishers, it would seem that desperate measures are being sought by reputable companies. Indeed amazon itself is now awash with efforts at extracting more money, e.g. "set up a regular purchase of toothbrush heads" (regular being maybe once a year for the pack I bought ) and "save money - use our credit card". And when I log into my bank account, I'm ALWAYS shown cross-selling before seeing what I want to see e.g. open an isa, you've been approved for a loan, blah. So much clutter.

Anyway, in this some of the companies have settled already, so does that likely make all them guilty?

[Dogg Thang]

It seems like very messy business and definitely feels like a conspiracy. And because the end result was higher prices for people, I can see many if not most people coming down on the side of Amazon because getting things cheap no matter how that is achieved seems to be all that many care about.

But Amazon's scale of loss leaders and selling things at or below cost is unsustainable and I can't possibly see how it could be good for any industry in the end. Oh it works for Amazon and got them to where they are today but it just becomes a contest of who can absorb as much loss to take out their competition and is a complete race to the bottom. They do the same for music. And that is why Amazon have to have other efforts at extracting more money.

Amazon and retailers like it can devalue a product so much that it eventually kills that product and publishers seem to have reacted to this long term fear. Worth noting that in the short term, it seems the Amazon deal would have worked out great for them as Amazon were paying for the books wholesale no matter what they charged the customer. So making a drastic change to that model would not have been a light decision.

I guess the longer it went on, the harder it would be to claw back any value. It's much easier to ask people to pay less than it is to ask people to pay more. We're now living in an age where people seem to resent paying more for a music CD that could give them hours, days, months of enjoyment than they would pay for a cheap lunch. Some resent paying more for a game that they might play for months than they'd pay for a chocolate bar. Same is happening to books. So I can understand them doing something to try to prevent that.

Price fixing doesn't ever sound nice and, just as a basic concept, doesn't feel like something I should support. But then selling things at or below cost seems like a world of pure unsustainable bull**** and I'd support that even less.

[NW2013]

Great news. I'll buy many more books as a result. When I first started buying ebooks they were ?2 - ?4 for releases from major publishers but this changed to be often the same price as a paperback or more.

Understand your points Dogg Thang but with ebooks I feel it's taking the p to charge the same for a digital product as for the physical equivalent.

[averybluemonkey]

It seems like very messy business and
...
seems like a world of pure unsustainable bull**** and I'd support that even less.

Don't think I've ever agreed with a post more. This is only exacerbated by the fact that plenty of professional authors have to maintain second jobs because pay rates are so low in the industry. Books offer such good value for money as it is and cutting prices won't see a compensating increase in sales unfortunately.