Apple Guilty of Price Fixing

[Imran Siddiqui]

When you're the single dominant market player, attempting to set the price across the entire market to a single price that is unsustainable over the long term is effectively price-fixing.

A) I will still contend that is an incredibly strange notion of the word "price fixing" (akin to saying the $0.99 per song was price fixing by Apple), B) Who says it is unsustainable in the long term?! Amazon makes money on the $9.99 prices - in fact that's where they make their money on e-books, because Kindles actually cost the same to make as their price.

[The Mad Monk]

Am I terribly old fashioned if I prefer paper books that I can read and put on a shelf and pick up later and peruse?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Yes

[The Mad Monk]

Oh well.

[regexcellent]

First I checked to see if it was an EU court (my first guess) but well, seeing as it's not...hah, OWNED.

[snoopy369]

A) I will still contend that is an incredibly strange notion of the word "price fixing" (akin to saying the $0.99 per song was price fixing by Apple), B) Who says it is unsustainable in the long term?! Amazon makes money on the $9.99 prices - in fact that's where they make their money on e-books, because Kindles actually cost the same to make as their price.

I don't know proportions, but they definitely lost money on some of them. That was the initial concern by publishers, and why they had a few very public fights (Macmillan a few years ago for example). Amazon was willing to lose money in the short term to lock people into Kindles.

It is unsustainable because the publisher can't make much/any money at 9.99 currently - again, perhaps this will change over time if ebooks are more popular than physical books used to be, but at the number of books sold, they wouldn't have much room to cover editors/etc. assuming Amazon wanted some cut.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Amazon most assuredly loses money on its Kindles. They hope to make up that loss based on volume of e-books sold.

[snoopy369]

I don't disagree with that. However, they also most assuredly lost money on some of the kindle books at $9.99. Amazon is big enough to play the long game - force prices down to where they keep out competition and thus allow them to reap profits in the long run. Their hope was twofold - keep out competition from entering if they saw there wasn't much profit to be had, and put pressure on publishers to lower prices so that over the long run they could increase the number of units sold (which would likely benefit them both by driving out B&M stores and giving more opportunity for profit), with perhaps another thought - drive publishers out of business so that Amazon could step in and do the whole thing themselves.

[Aeson]

I know people who make money writing .99 ebooks. I know others who make lots of money giving ebooks away for free. This without any sort of fan base for the author name. Perhaps the publishing industry needs to update along with the available technology.

[snoopy369]

How do they make money giving away books for free

[The Mad Monk]

Volume.

[Aeson]

How do they make money giving away books for free

Google "How does Google make money when I don't pay to use it?"