| DISCLAIMER: I haven't worked at Amazon for some time now. The author makes a number of unsourced assumptions about the business models involved, as well as his moral rights. You'll have to decide for yourself if those are correct: "The US Kindle store caps book prices at $9.99 even for hardcovers that normally have a retail price of $23.95 and which would typically cost $16 in dead tree format via Amazon. Amazon gets the books at this price by taking the publishers for a huge [...] discount" That is a fact, is it? Publishers happily sell their books for much less money so they become Kindle bestsellers, thereby undermining their traditional distribution models and pissing off every bookstore? REALLY? "and by saying "screw you" to the small fry like me, who are looking for our points on the referral scheme" Because Amazon has given you a few % off sales coming from your links, you have the moral right to extend this scheme to all future ways in which Amazon will ever sell anything? How is that a "screw you" in any way? "One nasty suspicion of mine is that Amazon were demanding discounts so ludicrous that publishers would be making a net loss on each book sold after expenses and royalties" Publishers are just lining up to make heavy losses so they can sell electronic content, i.e. they are just desperate to subsidize Amazon's ebook reader? Think this through for a minute. "what have I got against Amazon's Kindle? 1) DRM. (It's unethical, immoral, fattening, and a royal pain in the ass" That's strange, since most of the complains seem to be about the cut from referral fees he's not making anymore. A point that, coincidentally, doesn't appear anywhere in the conclusion anymore. "4) They're using their monopsony position to fuck over their suppliers (i.e. the publishers) " You'd think someone from a publisher (horribly leak-happy companies, the lot of them) would've let something on by now. Strange how nobody's done so. |