InBlack wrote on Sep 17, 2014, 04:07:
The publishers set the prices. However, what Amazon is doing is undercutting EVEN THE NET PRICES. I cannot stress how fucking low this is. They are selling the books for LESS than they bought them. They are still making money on the huge bestsellers (and all the assorted other shit that they now sell) but by undercutting all the rest of the books and selling them at a slight loss, they are ENLARGING their user base and destroying any and ALL kind of fair competition.
EDIT: Apparently you weren't talking about ebooks but paper books, or at least judging from your post in reply to PHJF. Paper books are on the way out. It's a sad reality of life. The newspapers all bitched and whined and moaned too when the internet was making them obsolete.
Find a new business model or go out of business. Life is hard. And again, small bookstores are doing fine.
Original reply below (I don't feel like modifying it.)
That's an interesting perspective, but seeing as how small bookstores (Ie, not the giant pieces of shit like Barnes and Noble) have been reporting steadily growing business for the past three years, I'm going to say that it's not born out in practice.
I don't know what Amazon pays for books or whether they make a loss on it or not. Since we're talking about ebooks here, I'm going to go with the generally held belief that since we're just talking about an additional digital copy, which can be generated for LITERALLY zero cost, the idea that you're suffering a loss on it is just stuck in the old "WELL DAMMIT, 9000 PEOPLE AT THE PUBLISHER HAVE TO EAT FROM THIS BOOK!" way of thinking.
None of the rest of the competition is big enough to afford to sell books at a LOSS.
Again, small bookstores are doing fine.
They are quickly and efficiently turning themselves into the only customer on the block. You sell to them, or you dont sell at all.
Yeah, it's amazing how quickly people will flock to a company that
A) Gives them good prices
B) Gives them great customer service
C) Treats the authors just as well as their customers
As someone who works for a company that does both retail and publishing, Amazon's practices are killings us.
Sorry to hear that. Find a new business model.
They are basically killing the industry.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. No. What they are doing is killing the OLD industry. The industry that said that a fucking Ebook should be MORE EXPENSIVE THAN A PAPER VERSION. The industry that has long paid authors between 2-12% of the sales price of a book. The industry that has conspired with Apple to artificially keep the prices of ebooks well above what the market would otherwise pay.
You know what? FUCK that industry. Fuck it with a fucking rusty saw. It can't fucking die quickly enough.
All this bullshit "Oh, but publishers give advances to poor authors so they can quit their jobs and write!" broohaha in this letter is nothing but blatant fucking lies. Sure, they give advances. To the likes of Stephen King and Suzanne Collins. You think that as a peon writer you get any advances? You practically have to fucking pay THEM to get your fucking book on a shelf.
This is the DEFINITION of anti trust and needs to be stopped.
Yeah, no, it really isn't. The definition of anti-trust is what the big 5 publishers got their ass handed over in court: Illegal price fixing.
Amazon is creating a monopoly the likes of which the world has never seen.
Boohooo, as opposed to the monopoly of the big 5 which treated both its customers AND its product like shit. How terrible. Amazon treats both customers AND authors fantastically.
This currently benefits the consumer, but once they eliminate ALL competition guess who gets to pick up the bill.
Yeah yeah, waaaah, won't someone think of the children! It sounds very similar to the whole "Amazon's image will be eroded if this continues" whiny-ass fairytale bullshit in the letter itself.