9 ms·

The collective insanity of the publishing industry

204 points by suraj 11y ago

lenepp 11y ago
What a great piece. The point about how the big publishers have more control over printed books gets to the heart of the matter.
Pxtl 11y ago
I'm surprised Amazon hasnt gone into publishing. Get some big name authors on board, pick up some classics, etc. Do Netflix.
- ghaff 11y ago
  They have dipped their toe in the water with Singles. In general I'd expect their approach might be to continue to expand their relationship with self-published authors who their data shows has promise. With big-name authors they're just on the same playing field as the other publishers.
- dminor 11y ago
  They have - aside from Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon has their own imprints that do traditional publishing. Many bookstores refuse to stock those books though.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- kevinr 11y ago
  Amazon have a huge pile of different publishing imprints, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Publishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Publishing And that's just original imprints; it doesn't list things like Audible, which Amazon owns, and which are THE major audiobook publisher, but almost always published secondary to a print publication rather than original. And that's not including Amazon's multiple self-publishing options, including the Kindle Direct program.
Booktrope 11y ago
The comments to this post are really interesting - one comment claims that (according to an agent) agency pricing was Amazon's idea, not the big 5, even though, the big 5 very publicly insisted on agency pricing. It's really absurd. Of course, agency pricing for ebooks was first pushed by Apple, part of what got them and the big publishers in trouble for antitrust conspiracy (when the publishers agreed to withhold books from Amazon if Amazon kept discounting) The the comments about Amazon and publishing, Amazon has a very major publishing operation (called, suprise!, Amazon Publishing). It's grabbing market share very quickly. If you want information about this check authorearnings.com (which provides industry sales estimates that include self-publishing) Of course the big story in the publishing business is that self-publishing is rapidly eclipsing traditional publishers in the ebook space. Amazon is not only doing Netflix for books. It's doing Netflix for film and TV. The big competitor to Netflix is not any network or studio -- it's Amazon.
petra 11y ago
If the ebooks many want to read are expensive electronically, maybe many won't buy a kindle, but still buy the printed books ? And without a kindle, they won't buy cheaper books from the competition ? And maybe this will slow Amazon's success for a few profitable years, more profitable than current loses ? And maybe by that time the publishers will find an ebook strategy that will work(hard to believe, but maybe). Also,let's look on the other side - what happens if ebooks fully kill print ? can publishing even make money in such state of affairs ?
dcw303 11y ago
> The sales that would go to that $15.99 book are going to lower-priced books from indie authors and self-published authors, like me. > They actually proved the consumer will buy the cheaper option, but okay I find it alarming that an indie author does not seem to be concerned with cheap product flooding the market. Amazon's attempts to lower barriers to entry means more aspiring authors competing for a piece of the pie. Look at how the race to the bottom in the App Store is destroying indie iPhone developers.
- kevingadd 11y ago
  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-ebook/ 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.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Alarming, isn't it? I mean, imagine the chaos that would result if everybody was allowed to put up websites, publish whatever they wanted and charge what they wanted.
officialchicken 11y ago
> Guess who saw an uptick in print sales in 2015? Textbooks.
chrisseaton 11y ago
> Often, the prices were higher than the price of the print edition, which is just fundamentally insane. Why is this insane? An ebook has more value to me than the print one as it's more convenient. Since it has more value to me I'm prepared to pay more. The physical copy could be free and I'd still pay to get the ebook instead in most cases.
- kevinr 11y ago
  Also that's often comparing the discounted price of a print edition to the full price of the ebook. Print books being still sold under the old wholesale model, Amazon can still discount them, whereas ebooks being sold under the new model, Amazon can't discount them.
  - GabrielF00 11y ago
    When I'm looking at prices at an online bookstore, I don't care what the list price is, I care what the price I have to pay is. When a physical object that has to be manufactured and shipped costs more than a text file, I feel ripped off. Especially since I can lend a physical book to someone or sell it to a local used book store, neither of which I can do with an ebook.
    - kevinr 11y ago
      Leaving aside the secondary markets for a moment---which yes, I agree with you on---do you feel ripped off buying video games online? They are, after all, just really large files.
      - GabrielF00 11y ago
        I don't buy enough video games to really answer that - usually I buy a couple of games a year during Steam sales and that's about it. I usually buy a couple of books a month (print and ebooks).
        11y ago
kevinr 11y ago
I have a small pile of friends in publishing, so I'll take this from the other side. The reasons for the publishers' apparent insanity are: * Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost. Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me. Salaries in publishing have for decades been nosing around the minimum the market will bear---as just one example, freelance proofreaders get paid a penny per word; the good ones get two. Many freelance proofreaders are also editors, copyeditors, and authors in their own right, and hustle their asses off to make incomes that, coming from tech, we wouldn't consider starvation wages. * Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not.
- pgrote 11y ago
  "* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not." I think this is the number one reason. The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. I buy a fair number of non-fiction books and loved when ebooks emerged as a viable way to buy a book at what I perceived to be a reasonable price. Now that the agency model has been in force I've just shifted how I buy ... I buy used books from Amazon. All the books I used to buy as ebooks the publisher was receiving revenue. Now, they don't receive any money from my purchases. The book publishing industry still has a window of opportunity to transition to ebooks under their own direction, but it's almost closed. See the recording industry.
  - kevinr 11y ago
    > The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance? This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty published books over the last thirty years, books you may have read or heard of, start a Patreon so that he might, for the first time in his life, afford health insurance. People working full-time in publishing might have health insurance but are working for well below market (by outside of tech standards, which are pretty embarrassing) in some of the most expensive cities on earth. And they can't just move, because then they'd get converted to contract and lose their health insurance. This is not to shame you for buying used books---that's fine, there's no way I'd have the library I do without them, and I grew up groveling the library and used bookstores because that was all we could afford. Readers are readers. But---and I encounter this again and again---readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.
muddi900 11y ago
The publishing industry did this before by colluding with Apple. Had to settle out of court with DoJ over it.
jay_kyburz 11y ago
I'm often laughed at when I suggest it, but I think the publishing world needs to look at what's happening with free to play games. You remove the barrier to entry so that as many people as possible will try your product (free). You identify those people who really enjoy your book and want to consume more of the same. You provide them with so much content that they can spend as must as they like. It's not unreasonable for people to spend 100's of dollars a month enjoying their favorite pastimes. Why put a $15 cap on it per book.
- yolesaber 11y ago
  Congratulations, you invented the magazine.
  - jay_kyburz 11y ago
    I see you are not familiar with free to play games, or magazines, or both.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- toyg 11y ago
  The problem is that content generation for books is extremely expensive and non-repeatable. What are you going to sell, the same word over and over? Illustrations (which are expensive themselves)?
  - lmm 11y ago
    At the high level, sell commissioned side-stories for the super-fans. Below that, special limited editions, expensive bonus features, alternate endings, merchandise.
    - toyg 11y ago
      Stephen King (or rather his publisher) experimented with a lot of these options through the years. He was widely shunned in the writing community. There are important cultural elements that stand in the way of such models.
deegles 11y ago
If Amazon really wanted to twist the knife, they would look into making the first-sale doctrine apply to ebooks. They might have to limit it to Kindle-to-Kindle sales at first, but Amazon would be able to take a cut of every book transfer in perpetuity. My guess is that it would drive authors into services like Kindle Unlimited, since they would be able to create a long-term income stream unlike physical books or non-transferrable ebooks.
kitsune_ 11y ago
Hachette isn't stupid. Amazon has a publishing arm, and of course, more importantly, has the Kindle. By lowering the prices Amazon gets people to buy into their eco-system . As a publisher you don't want a single distrubutor controlling your market.
coldtea 11y ago
>That sounds thoroughly reasonable, and it sort of is, but please let me explain because the crazy is in the details. What was happening was that Amazon was discounting the price of the ebooks, and it may seem like this is something the Big 5 would want to stop, except the markdown was coming off of Amazon’s end. In other words, if Hachette wanted to charge $15.99 for an ebook, and Amazon marked it down to $9.99, Hachette was still paid their cut of the full price of the book. More people will buy a book at $9.99 than at $15.99, so essentially, the Big 5 was coming out ahead in this arrangement in every conceivable way. They collected royalties at an unreasonably high price point while moving the number of units that corresponded to a lower price point. Sounds good, unless you factor in other Hachette customers that get the shaft, because a company with deep pockets like Amazon uses their cash reserves to undercut them with unhealthy margins (actually negative margins). This is downright monopoly behavior. Why should they accept it? And of course those other outlets will complain to Hachette or ask for the same prices. It's also a good way to screw the customers in the long run, as they get their cheap books from Amazon first, and then when the other stores with lesser means have died (unable to keep up with the negative margins), they can jack the prices again...
- AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
  Everyone keeps saying that Amazon has a secret evil plan to become THE source for everything and then jack up the prices, but no actual evidence of this ever happening.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    "Secret evil plan"? That's the very open and natural thing for any monopoly to do. It has been done by monopolies time and again. Amazon just haven't reached that status in most areas yet. And where it has, e.g. books, it already used its power to manipulate producers and the market in its favor. Siphoning millions for selling books below what you pay for them is not some kind of marketing trick, it's anti-competitive behavior meant to kill less loaded rivals...
  - kolinko 11y ago
    It's not a secret evil plan. It's quite obvious, and such techiques are well known (and forbidden actually). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
amelius 11y ago
It seems that all creative/intellectual industries are caught in some sort of race to the bottom (e.g., software, publishing, music). This is sad.
- hrnnnnnn 11y ago
  I think it's the same reason salaries are low in the games industry: everyone would rather have an interesting job in a creative industry for less money than a boring job at a bank for lots of money.
pja 11y ago
Anybody with the slightest interest in this topic should read Charlie Stross’ (cstross on HN) series of essays on the publishing industry: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...
facepalm 11y ago
I can see the rationale of the publishers - they don't want Amazon to become a monopoly. Their counter-strategy will fail, but that is besides the point. What is really puzzling is the many authors who thought the publishers are fighting for them and stated public support for their publishers. Especially since the publishers blockade apparently cost them a lot of sales.
Grue3 11y ago
So apparently the publishers trying to prevent a monopoly-grabbing maneuver from Amazon is insane. On the contrary, it would be insane if they let Amazon drive all other booksellers out of business and ruin the market.
jameshart 11y ago
The behavior does look irrational if you ignore the fact that publishers also want to sell their books in to other retailers and those retailers will not order books if they believe Amazon will deeply undercut them for the same titles. So they ask the publisher to put in place a deal with all the retailers through which the book will be sold that guarantees no one retailer will offer the book below a certain price. This is, of course, quite a lot like price fixing, but seems to be how it's been done in many areas of retail for just about ever.

204 points by suraj 11y ago

What a great piece. The point about how the big publishers have more control over printed books gets to the heart of the matter.

Pxtl 11y ago

I'm surprised Amazon hasnt gone into publishing. Get some big name authors on board, pick up some classics, etc. Do Netflix.

ghaff 11y ago
They have dipped their toe in the water with Singles. In general I'd expect their approach might be to continue to expand their relationship with self-published authors who their data shows has promise. With big-name authors they're just on the same playing field as the other publishers.
dminor 11y ago
They have - aside from Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon has their own imprints that do traditional publishing. Many bookstores refuse to stock those books though.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
kevinr 11y ago
Amazon have a huge pile of different publishing imprints, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Publishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Publishing And that's just original imprints; it doesn't list things like Audible, which Amazon owns, and which are THE major audiobook publisher, but almost always published secondary to a print publication rather than original. And that's not including Amazon's multiple self-publishing options, including the Kindle Direct program.

Booktrope 11y ago

The comments to this post are really interesting - one comment claims that (according to an agent) agency pricing was Amazon's idea, not the big 5, even though, the big 5 very publicly insisted on agency pricing. It's really absurd. Of course, agency pricing for ebooks was first pushed by Apple, part of what got them and the big publishers in trouble for antitrust conspiracy (when the publishers agreed to withhold books from Amazon if Amazon kept discounting) The the comments about Amazon and publishing, Amazon has a very major publishing operation (called, suprise!, Amazon Publishing). It's grabbing market share very quickly. If you want information about this check authorearnings.com (which provides industry sales estimates that include self-publishing) Of course the big story in the publishing business is that self-publishing is rapidly eclipsing traditional publishers in the ebook space. Amazon is not only doing Netflix for books. It's doing Netflix for film and TV. The big competitor to Netflix is not any network or studio -- it's Amazon.

petra 11y ago

If the ebooks many want to read are expensive electronically, maybe many won't buy a kindle, but still buy the printed books ? And without a kindle, they won't buy cheaper books from the competition ? And maybe this will slow Amazon's success for a few profitable years, more profitable than current loses ? And maybe by that time the publishers will find an ebook strategy that will work(hard to believe, but maybe). Also,let's look on the other side - what happens if ebooks fully kill print ? can publishing even make money in such state of affairs ?

dcw303 11y ago

> The sales that would go to that $15.99 book are going to lower-priced books from indie authors and self-published authors, like me. > They actually proved the consumer will buy the cheaper option, but okay I find it alarming that an indie author does not seem to be concerned with cheap product flooding the market. Amazon's attempts to lower barriers to entry means more aspiring authors competing for a piece of the pie. Look at how the race to the bottom in the App Store is destroying indie iPhone developers.

kevingadd 11y ago
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-ebook/ 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.
jpatokal 11y ago
Alarming, isn't it? I mean, imagine the chaos that would result if everybody was allowed to put up websites, publish whatever they wanted and charge what they wanted.

officialchicken 11y ago

> Guess who saw an uptick in print sales in 2015? Textbooks.

chrisseaton 11y ago

> Often, the prices were higher than the price of the print edition, which is just fundamentally insane. Why is this insane? An ebook has more value to me than the print one as it's more convenient. Since it has more value to me I'm prepared to pay more. The physical copy could be free and I'd still pay to get the ebook instead in most cases.

kevinr 11y ago
Also that's often comparing the discounted price of a print edition to the full price of the ebook. Print books being still sold under the old wholesale model, Amazon can still discount them, whereas ebooks being sold under the new model, Amazon can't discount them.
- GabrielF00 11y ago
  When I'm looking at prices at an online bookstore, I don't care what the list price is, I care what the price I have to pay is. When a physical object that has to be manufactured and shipped costs more than a text file, I feel ripped off. Especially since I can lend a physical book to someone or sell it to a local used book store, neither of which I can do with an ebook.
  - kevinr 11y ago
    Leaving aside the secondary markets for a moment---which yes, I agree with you on---do you feel ripped off buying video games online? They are, after all, just really large files.
    - GabrielF00 11y ago
      I don't buy enough video games to really answer that - usually I buy a couple of games a year during Steam sales and that's about it. I usually buy a couple of books a month (print and ebooks).
      - 11y ago

kevinr 11y ago

I have a small pile of friends in publishing, so I'll take this from the other side. The reasons for the publishers' apparent insanity are: * Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost. Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me. Salaries in publishing have for decades been nosing around the minimum the market will bear---as just one example, freelance proofreaders get paid a penny per word; the good ones get two. Many freelance proofreaders are also editors, copyeditors, and authors in their own right, and hustle their asses off to make incomes that, coming from tech, we wouldn't consider starvation wages. * Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not.

pgrote 11y ago
"* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not." I think this is the number one reason. The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. I buy a fair number of non-fiction books and loved when ebooks emerged as a viable way to buy a book at what I perceived to be a reasonable price. Now that the agency model has been in force I've just shifted how I buy ... I buy used books from Amazon. All the books I used to buy as ebooks the publisher was receiving revenue. Now, they don't receive any money from my purchases. The book publishing industry still has a window of opportunity to transition to ebooks under their own direction, but it's almost closed. See the recording industry.
- kevinr 11y ago
  > The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value. How much do you value your favorite authors eating or having health insurance? This is a serious question: just a few days ago I was suggesting that a friend, twenty published books over the last thirty years, books you may have read or heard of, start a Patreon so that he might, for the first time in his life, afford health insurance. People working full-time in publishing might have health insurance but are working for well below market (by outside of tech standards, which are pretty embarrassing) in some of the most expensive cities on earth. And they can't just move, because then they'd get converted to contract and lose their health insurance. This is not to shame you for buying used books---that's fine, there's no way I'd have the library I do without them, and I grew up groveling the library and used bookstores because that was all we could afford. Readers are readers. But---and I encounter this again and again---readers' perception of value in books is fundamentally misaligned with the actual economics of the book trade, to the detriment of both.

muddi900 11y ago

The publishing industry did this before by colluding with Apple. Had to settle out of court with DoJ over it.

jay_kyburz 11y ago

I'm often laughed at when I suggest it, but I think the publishing world needs to look at what's happening with free to play games. You remove the barrier to entry so that as many people as possible will try your product (free). You identify those people who really enjoy your book and want to consume more of the same. You provide them with so much content that they can spend as must as they like. It's not unreasonable for people to spend 100's of dollars a month enjoying their favorite pastimes. Why put a $15 cap on it per book.

yolesaber 11y ago
Congratulations, you invented the magazine.
- jay_kyburz 11y ago
  I see you are not familiar with free to play games, or magazines, or both.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
toyg 11y ago
The problem is that content generation for books is extremely expensive and non-repeatable. What are you going to sell, the same word over and over? Illustrations (which are expensive themselves)?
- lmm 11y ago
  At the high level, sell commissioned side-stories for the super-fans. Below that, special limited editions, expensive bonus features, alternate endings, merchandise.
  - toyg 11y ago
    Stephen King (or rather his publisher) experimented with a lot of these options through the years. He was widely shunned in the writing community. There are important cultural elements that stand in the way of such models.

deegles 11y ago

If Amazon really wanted to twist the knife, they would look into making the first-sale doctrine apply to ebooks. They might have to limit it to Kindle-to-Kindle sales at first, but Amazon would be able to take a cut of every book transfer in perpetuity. My guess is that it would drive authors into services like Kindle Unlimited, since they would be able to create a long-term income stream unlike physical books or non-transferrable ebooks.

kitsune_ 11y ago

Hachette isn't stupid. Amazon has a publishing arm, and of course, more importantly, has the Kindle. By lowering the prices Amazon gets people to buy into their eco-system . As a publisher you don't want a single distrubutor controlling your market.

coldtea 11y ago

>That sounds thoroughly reasonable, and it sort of is, but please let me explain because the crazy is in the details. What was happening was that Amazon was discounting the price of the ebooks, and it may seem like this is something the Big 5 would want to stop, except the markdown was coming off of Amazon’s end. In other words, if Hachette wanted to charge $15.99 for an ebook, and Amazon marked it down to $9.99, Hachette was still paid their cut of the full price of the book. More people will buy a book at $9.99 than at $15.99, so essentially, the Big 5 was coming out ahead in this arrangement in every conceivable way. They collected royalties at an unreasonably high price point while moving the number of units that corresponded to a lower price point. Sounds good, unless you factor in other Hachette customers that get the shaft, because a company with deep pockets like Amazon uses their cash reserves to undercut them with unhealthy margins (actually negative margins). This is downright monopoly behavior. Why should they accept it? And of course those other outlets will complain to Hachette or ask for the same prices. It's also a good way to screw the customers in the long run, as they get their cheap books from Amazon first, and then when the other stores with lesser means have died (unable to keep up with the negative margins), they can jack the prices again...

AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
Everyone keeps saying that Amazon has a secret evil plan to become THE source for everything and then jack up the prices, but no actual evidence of this ever happening.
- coldtea 11y ago
  "Secret evil plan"? That's the very open and natural thing for any monopoly to do. It has been done by monopolies time and again. Amazon just haven't reached that status in most areas yet. And where it has, e.g. books, it already used its power to manipulate producers and the market in its favor. Siphoning millions for selling books below what you pay for them is not some kind of marketing trick, it's anti-competitive behavior meant to kill less loaded rivals...
- kolinko 11y ago
  It's not a secret evil plan. It's quite obvious, and such techiques are well known (and forbidden actually). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

amelius 11y ago

It seems that all creative/intellectual industries are caught in some sort of race to the bottom (e.g., software, publishing, music). This is sad.

hrnnnnnn 11y ago
I think it's the same reason salaries are low in the games industry: everyone would rather have an interesting job in a creative industry for less money than a boring job at a bank for lots of money.

pja 11y ago

Anybody with the slightest interest in this topic should read Charlie Stross’ (cstross on HN) series of essays on the publishing industry: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

facepalm 11y ago

I can see the rationale of the publishers - they don't want Amazon to become a monopoly. Their counter-strategy will fail, but that is besides the point. What is really puzzling is the many authors who thought the publishers are fighting for them and stated public support for their publishers. Especially since the publishers blockade apparently cost them a lot of sales.

Grue3 11y ago

So apparently the publishers trying to prevent a monopoly-grabbing maneuver from Amazon is insane. On the contrary, it would be insane if they let Amazon drive all other booksellers out of business and ruin the market.

jameshart 11y ago

The behavior does look irrational if you ignore the fact that publishers also want to sell their books in to other retailers and those retailers will not order books if they believe Amazon will deeply undercut them for the same titles. So they ask the publisher to put in place a deal with all the retailers through which the book will be sold that guarantees no one retailer will offer the book below a certain price. This is, of course, quite a lot like price fixing, but seems to be how it's been done in many areas of retail for just about ever.