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Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

This may be the funniest and saddest thing I've read all year.

So $MEGACORP abuses their absolute monopolistic position in the market to underhandedly negotiate with book publishers and force their hand into working the way $MEGACORP wants: in order to gain access to $MEGACORPs completely dominated (but technically not a monopoly*) audience who wishes to buy books in a convenient way online, book publishers must bow down to $MEGACORP and pay the tax. Meanwhile, everyone else who sells books through alternative avenues is decimated because the audience only wants to buy books through $MEGACORP.

And you can replace $MEGACORP with both 'Apple' and 'Amazon', and it is 100% factually accurate. Beautiful. It's fucking turtles eating turtles all the way down.

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It's not really comparable because Amazon never did anything to try to stop anyone from buying books through any other channel. The platform they do own, AWS, unlike the iphone, is perfectly open to competitors to Amazon's retail business.

Unless you count selling books at a loss to hurt their competition.

It's a less direct form of market manipulation and one that doesn't usually meet the US's legal standards for antitrust, but it's a strategy Amazon loves to use.

A quick google search doesn't turn up many good sources on that allegation. The best I could find says that they do make a small profit but at a much lower margin than bookstores, which makes sense given Amazon's business model. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/07/13...

That article lists one example which "likely still turns a small profit", and contains allegations from other groups that Amazon is selling some books below cost.

That small margin above wholesale in the article's example is probably still effectively selling at a loss when you account for overhead of running the store, shipping, etc. It certainly would be for a smaller competitor.

Either of those represents a price that a competitor whose only business is selling books cannot compete with. Amazon can offer these prices as a loss leader because of their position in other markets, not because it has found a more optimal way to run the business of selling books.

News articles are for clicks. If they could find an example of selling at a loss, they would have used that because it would get more clicks. The fact that they couldn't find one tells me that the allegations are likely to be false. The fact that googling "Amazon selling books at a loss" didn't turn up massive amounts of articles from anti-tech media companies also tells me that. The fact that selling books at a loss to drive out competition (which is, in fact, illegal) is not even mentioned in the anti-trust complaint against Amazon tells me that the allegations are false.

It's mentioned in the lawsuit which described how Apple orchestrated the publishing industry to raise its prices for Apple to have room to mandate a 30% share [1]

Amazon was selling eBooks at $9.99, for Apple it was an issue because they couldn't ask a 30% share from publishers AND compete at $9.99 because Amazon achieved that price due to wholesale volume-deals, and likely not with a 30%+ margin.

Publishers wanted Amazon to increase sales-prices from $9.99, but due to their wholesale model they couldn't dictate that. Even when they increased wholesale prices, Amazon kept their sales-price of many NYT bestsellers at $9.99 making a loss (probably to drive eReader growth).

Quote: "Amazon continued to sell books at $9.99, losing money, even when publishers increased the wholesale price of books they were giving the online giant."

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-steve-jobs-and-apple-fix...

>It's not really comparable because Amazon never did anything to try to stop anyone from buying books through any other channel.

Neither does Apple. Amazon prevents all of their sellers from selling their goods at any sort of discount anywhere else (including through direct-to-consumer channels).

>The platform they do own, AWS, unlike the iphone, is perfectly open to competitors to Amazon's retail business.

It's not apples-to-apples comparison. Here's a better one ... Amazon will gather competitive metrics from sellers on their marketplace (i.e. their 'partners' and 'costumers') and then launch a competing product, undercut them on price, rig their search (to prioritize their product) and ultimately drive them out of business.

Apple is bad, but their terribleness is limited to the Mac-iOS ecosystem ... Amazon is way worse.

Nobody in the digital-marketplace business is a Good Guy. Unfortunately, sometimes we need two sets of scumbags to fight it out to find some decent compromise for society as a whole. See also: Miranda rights, VHS vs Betamax, etc.

> Amazon will gather competitive metrics from sellers on their marketplace (i.e. their 'partners' and 'costumers') and then launch a competing product, undercut them on price, and rig their search

Brick and mortar retailers do the exact same thing and make generics that are exactly the same as best selling brand names, put them in favorable shelf position, and even put "compare to <brand>!" on their labels. This practice has probably saved me multiple thousands of dollars over my lifetime, so it is definitely to the benefit of the consumer and I am 100% in favor of it continuing. If you, as a company, add nothing that can't be replicated to your product other than a brand label, then you deserve to be replicated and undercut. That is a perfect example of the market working towards the public good.

Indeed - the irony was not lost on me of someone from Amazon complaining about Apple's anti-competitive behaviour. The difference is that what Amazon does is not limited to the book publishing space and a particular device. Amazon forces ALL of their sellers to normalize prices for all customers an all platforms.

> This may be the funniest and saddest thing I've read all year.

‘Funniest thing in a fortnight’ sounds less impressive.

You’re comment is actually funny, the OPs just makes one sad and frustrated.

This must be f*cking really hard with our culture. I for once can say that I have been reading less because Amazon's recommendation algorithm keeps throwing at me books with trendy covers that make me cringe. And same with the blurbs. Sometimes, if I manage to go over my cringe reaction to those two things, the book under it is actually good. Therefore, I get a feeling authors and publishers feel they need to imitate the crowd and make the book look childish from the outside, in order to mollify The Algorithm.

Have you tried storygraph?

And the losers at the end of the day, are the consumers. Amazon & Apple are still making money hand over fist.

Piracy: it's the only sure way out!

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