This is standard Amazon PR baloney. Don’t believe it for a second. Amazon just wants more money for itself, plain and simple.
As far as eBooks are concerned, the battle is between Amazon and the publishers to cheat the writers out of the share they would get if the books were on paper. I don’t see how discouraging writers from writing helps anybody.
So that’s what the negotiations are about, really? Amazon is making demands about Hachette’s payments to its authors? No. Amazon wants flexibility in ebook pricing (so they can keep their stranglehold on ebook hardware). Hachette and all the publishers want to keep ebook prices high with total control of the price, so they can make more money. There are no good guys and bad guys here.
I think Amazon is more dangerous, long term, but I don’t want $15 or $20 ebooks to become the norm either.
Walmart may not be going anywhere, but it’s also unlikely to offer more than the NY Times Bestseller List (or equivalent) books. Walmart shows no signs of becoming a comprehensive source of books, e- or otherwise. It thus competes with Amazon on only a relative handful of books.
Amazon is not doing battle with Hachette on behalf of consumers; it’s doing battle with Hachette as part of its own quest for market dominance. In this respect, Amazon is just like every other business entity. This is not about Good versus Evil; this is about human nature. We seek to eliminate competition and achieve monopolistic power whenever possible. (It’s a legitimate function of government to determine whether monopolies benefit and promote economic productivity for the nation as a whole; in virtually all cases the answer is that monopoly is not beneficial to the economy as a whole. But that’s another thread.)
Amazon’s “low prices” will vanish the moment that Amazon puts every effective competitor out of business.
Actually, Amazon noticed that publishers were screwing authors out of payments for eBooks. Ergo, Amazon wants a share of that dough. Reducing costs to consumers is total PR nonsense.
There are definitely bad guys here. Publishers obviously and now Amazon is using its monopolistic position to get more dough from publishers and studios.
So people say. Is there any evidence for this in actual practice by Amazon?
I’m not inclined to believe in scare predictions.
I dunno, it’s a company that makes very little if any profit, has never paid a dividend, and does aggressive expansion for breakfast. What could the end game be?
I mean people have said the same things about Walmart and yet, even in towns where Walmart is the only game in town, it has very cheap prices on goods.
I think you’d see that change if Walmart became the only game in town everywhere. As it is, they can scarcely start charging $20 for a loaf of bread in Podunk, just because there are no other grocery stores there, because other suppliers of bread still exist, and they’d ship in $15 loaves and undercut Walmart.
(Also, if Walmart raised all prices in little towns with no other stores, it would be terrible publicity. If enough people became enraged at Walmart, then legislators might have to change current laws that let Walmart get away with a lot that it’s doing.)