Q:Hi John... First, full disclosure: I am a developer at Amazon, but not in any dept related to publishing or the Kindle, and my comments here are my own, not Amazon's. About your discussion on Amazon and book publishing... insofar as publishers do provide valuable services to authors, what's to stop them from continuing to? If that requires an e-book to sell for more than $2, then so be it. Is there a real difference between the author paying a portion of royalties to publishers and vice versa?

Anonymous

That’d be fine if the agency model survived (and in fact right now traditionally published books can compete at a $14.99 price point against $1.99 or even free direct-to-kindle books).

But Amazon is intent upon killing the agency model. If the agency model does go away, and amazon can again set prices, it will be happy to lose money on ebooks in order to increase its market share and establish a monopoly. It did this with ebooks before the agency model was introduced, and for years it has intentionally lost money on bestselling hardcovers in order to increase market share.

And as amazon increasingly becomes a book publisher of its own (it has hired many editors), it can undercut other publishers on the royalty side of things, which will allow it to monopolize both the editorial and the distribution side of the business.

Amazon pretty much acknowledges this is its ambition, although of course they never use the word monopoly.

(What the agency model is.)

158 Notes/ Hide

  1. metrosideros-polymorpha said: Can this be made rebloggable? This is an excellent point.