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Comment by thedailymail | Hacker News Reader

Amazon should introduce a progressive scale similar to the ones widely used in tax bracketing. The higher rates only kick in at price points that ensure the sale of a higher priced e-book will always result in more revenue for the author, even if the general trend is to take a bigger cut of higher priced items.

(Not that I am a fan of Amazon's publishing model - it just seems they are tripping over an already solved problem.)

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Maybe they intentionally want to keep books below 10 dollars?

Maybe they figured that in the end they have a lot more cheap books than a few that might be more than double because of the non-progressive scale.

For sure it’s an intentional strategy to keep books cheap. And indirectly also to prevent any competitors from selling the same books at a higher price.

They should just drop the bracketing entirely and give 70% to the authors in all cases, instead of the continued predatory gouging you’re suggesting.

It is neither predatory nor gouging, with TFA serving as perfect evidence. No one is compelled to agree to these terms.

When you own such a large portion of the ebook sales market, it very much could be considered predatory (bordering on monopolistic).

Larger authors are not compelled to agree to these terms sure, but if you’re a smaller publisher or author trying to get your work out there and noticed, it can be hard to gain ground without selling via Amazon.

As a "smaller author" who used Leanpub (not affiliated with them, just a satisfied customer – both reader and writer) to publish my Emacs Lisp book I can say that I don't care about putting it on Amazon, and I don't think I lost a lot (or anything) because of that.

OTOH, I published this book after about 7 years of weekly blogging, mostly about Emacs, so I think that everyone who might be interested in my book could easily know about it. And an intermediate Elisp textbook is rather a niche thing.

your niche is exactly the reason why you can get away without using Amazon.

Isn't that a great reason to not publish on Amazon?, you'd only increase their market share.

It's not as if Amazon is unaware, they'll fix their pricing system if enough people reject it.

Well, yes, it’s a great reason not to publish there, but only if you can afford not to do so. Amazon dominates the e-book market.

HN loves monopolies except when it's fashionable to hate them :)

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