Sorry to have to disagree with you, but I believe you are entirely wrong on this.
The initial deal with Kindle books was exactly the same as the deal with regular books: publisher set a wholesale price, and Amazon paid that price for every book they sold, be it physical or Kindle.
Apple and the publishers came out with the "Agency Model", where publishers would set the final retail price, the seller would get 30%, and the publisher would get 70%. After the publishers forced this on Amazon, it led to Amazon getting more per book in most cases, but also led to higher prices.
So no, Amazon was not gouging authors or publishers by setting lower prices. What it was doing was creating a "mindspace" that you "shouldn't" have to pay more than $10 for an eBook, and
that is what publishers were fighting. (Note that all Baen eBooks went for $6 at the time, so it's not like Amazon was setting an unreasonably low price point.) Amazon was often paying publishers more for teh eBook than readers were paying Amazon, and it's the publishers that forced Amazon to stop doing that.
Things I'm less certain about:
IIRC, the reason Amazon won the lawsuit was because it's considered anti-competitive for manufacturers to set up a cartel to
force a retailer to sell at a certain price, which was what the publishers did. If publishers are now only getting $0.70 when Amazon sells their book as a $1 loss leader, blame the publishers, not Amazon, because it's the publishers who fought to make that so.
And yes, Baen books has joined the Borg of Amazon. In order to protect the Baen authors, Baen agreed to a higher price on Amazon than they'd previously been charging, a price increase that doesn't affect eARCs or the monthly bundles, just the individual book price. In exchange for which people with Kindle's no longer have to stand on their heads in order to get Baen eBooks onto their devices. Not seeing the anti-publisher / anti-author behavior here.
For the last couple of centuries, publishers have been the "gatekeepers", getting to decide what books would be allowed out. Amazon is ending that. Good.
runsforcelery wrote:GlynnStewart wrote:I suspect it tends to be a matter of 'what does Amazon have on sale this week.'
One of the things I've learned in self-publishing is that Amazon seems to give the publisher 100% control of the e-book price, but they seem to have control to do whatever they want with the print copies.
Actually, no. That was what that ridiculous law suit against Simon and Schuster (which, unfortunately, Amazon won) was all about. The publishers
wanted control of the e-book prices and Amazon argued that would cost the public more than Amazon's pricing policies would. If you looked carefully at what they were really fighting about, however, it was Amazon's policy of steeply discounting the electronic prices for books by especially popular authors as an inducement to customers; they were
not discounting prices on low-number-of-sales books like e-text books or other "must have" volumes.
With dead-tree books, the publisher didn't care what the sale price was, because Amazon still had to buy them wholesale from the publisher before they sold them. If they wanted to sell the newest Stephen King hardcover for a buck apiece as a loss-leader to encourage additional sales of other books, that was fine; the publisher and the author had already earned their programmed profit and royalties, respectively, from the book, whatever the price at which Amazon chose to sell it to the public.
With e-books, the process is quite different, and the publishers' (and authors') earnings per book are based on
Amazon's selling price, not the publisher's wholesale price. It's a nice deal for Amazon, and the sheer size of the market share Bezos has captured means that, in the end, the publishers have to geek to Amazon's policies. Especially when a thoroughly stupid federal court judge completely misunderstands what's going on and sides with Amazon in a move which actually costs the reading public
more, overall, given their pricing structure for
all books sold rather than the bestsellers which Amazon's brief pretended (and the judge bought off on) were the
only books affected.
). I also read three or four others I also would not have purchased that were not worth paying for the remaining series books, so all in it has been worth it to me.