| Aside from the obvious errors the publishers made, it's EXTREMELY SENSIBLE to see Amazon going 'we're going to sell your books at $10 but pay you like they were $16' and respond with 'what's the trick?' Obviously, if you're doing something like that, there's some sort of upside for you. What's the upside? Is it... just speculating here... pushing literally every other serious bookseller out of the market by selling things at a loss, attaining near-monopoly status, and acquiring the ability to make publishers do whatever you want so you can crank your revenues up? Of course, even if Amazon were doing something like that (how implausible! :-) ), the publishers weren't going to put a stop to it with the kind of antics they got up to... There are already examples of how bad Amazon's pricing and fees are in areas where they have little competition - for example, the cost to deliver ebook downloads to users. For example:
In Japan, ebook download pricing is extremely low (in no small part due to manga). If it wasn't, nobody would sell their ebooks on amazon.co.jp, because they'd get utterly suffocated by the download fees.
In every other country, the download fees are dramatically higher than those in japan. So much higher that it in fact drives independent authors to leave out illustrations and carefully optimize their PDF files to reduce costs. You can see http://www.mhpbooks.com/what-does-it-cost-to-deliver-an-eboo... for an old article on the subject, but you can check the current rates and see that they haven't improved, and observe the very suspicious carve-out for japanese ebooks. |