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Amazon Will Change Its Ebook Contracts With Publishers as EU Ends Antitrust Probe (theverge.com)
The EU has reached an agreement with Amazon following an antitrust investigation into the company's ebook business. From a report: In 2015, the European Commission began a probe into the licensing deals Amazon was making with publishers, suggesting that the US giant was forcing them into unfair contracts that stifled competition in Europe's 1 billion Euro ($1.09 billion) ebook market. In January, Amazon suggested a number of changes it would make to its contracts, and the EU now says it's happy to accept them, bringing a close to the investigation. The parts of the contract the EU objected to were a number of "most-favored-nation" clauses. These required any publishers doing a deal with Amazon to reveal the terms of the contracts they made with rival distributers. Amazon could then demand that it got the same deal (or better) on things like ebook prices, agency commissions, promotion campaigns, and release dates.
>> charging more for the Ebook
Don't like the price? Just download it as a DRM-free PDF then.
That's pretty much how it works for movies/TV: if someone tries charging more than a couple of bucks for an HD rental, people will torrent* it instead. (* = or view a hijacked stream for live sports)
Soo.. they say Amazon stifled competition.. but the parts of their contracts that they objected to were the "show us your other deals and give us the same deal" clauses that keeps prices consistent across retailers and prevents publishers from making sweetheart deals like they did with Apple. I don't see how that stifle's competition, per se.
Because this is price fixing.
I had a friend who is an independently published author. There are some e-book publishers that, on occasion, run sales: they will offer her book for, say 99 cents for a week as a promotion.
Amazon has a robot that trolls the web watching the price of e-books from competitors. If the robot finds a book offered for less than the Amazon price anywhere, at any time, Amazon will pull the book off of Amazon because their contract says nobody else is allowed to sell it for less.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Your comment starts with "charging more for the Ebook than you do for the paperback!" and that makes no sense.
Under the wholesale model, Amazon charged $9.99 for most ebook titles to take market share away from other ebook retailers. Apple forced the industry to adopt the agency model that let publishers — not retailers — to set the ebook price. What some traditional publishers have done was to keep ebooks prices higher than paperbacks or hardbacks to protect their print business.
http://publishingtrendsetter.com/industryinsight/simple-explanation-agency-model/
Amazon has a robot that trolls the web watching the price of e-books from competitors. If the robot finds a book offered for less than the Amazon price anywhere, at any time, Amazon will pull the book off of Amazon because their contract says nobody else is allowed to sell it for less.
If you're not a member of the KDP Select program, which requires that you pull your ebooks from other retailers, you can't price your ebooks for free on Amazon. I used to trick the Amazon robot into setting some of my ebooks to free by having them for free elsewhere and then informing Amazon of the lower price. That trick doesn't work anymore.
What is this 'DRM' thingy you seem to be afraid of ?
(Note: I legally obtain the book I'm DeDRM-ing.
I'm just removing the DRM because I'm fed up with the Adobe Digital Edition fucking things up on a regular basis and access to my book getting b0rked yet again.
This kind of De-DRM-ing is actually tolerated in my local jurisdiction - as it should be everywhere)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The issue is that print doesn't cost a lot more money. You'd think that warehousing, printing, etc., would add a ton to the price of a book, but the system has been so optimized that the real cost of printing (+warehousing, stocking and shipping) adds about $1 to the retail price of a book. Even less on the cheaper editions. If you wondered why books are never returned to the publishers (or why some books have that "If you bought this book without its cover, it's illegal" text), that's a reason why - by not having to deal with returns, but having retailers ship just the covers o unsold copies back lets them do returns without really doing returns. (The book industry is such that there are rarely post-retail lives for books - if it doesn't sell at the retailer, moving it to another retailer doesn't generally work).
A lot of the price is in markups - retailers often get books for 40% off retail, which is why they can often offer up to 40% off the book . Then there are publisher markups, etc. The rest of it is costs - editors, typesetters, artists, and a bunch of other people who massage an author's manuscript into something that can be mass produced.
In the end, the real cost of printing a book is so tiny that for all intents and purposes, they cost the same0