The Price of Amazon
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
This bit is particularly disingenuous: "The hippie, black and women’s movements of the 1960s would not have been so successful in challenging authority without the bookstores, which made their ideas widely available and sympathetic in a way that television, for instance, did not."
Seriously? I mean, really, seriously, you just wrote that on a technology (wait for it) BLOG? The analogous movements of today has unprecedented access to spreading their ideas through blogs and websites and social media and petition sites and collaboration services and who knows what else - most of it available instantly and almost or entirely free. I don't think that if the occupy/tea party/anonymous/truther/conspiracy/pick-your-revolution-of-week movements have struggled for five minutes to make their ideas available, it was because of the lack of bookstores.
Yes and no.
His statement is correct in a historical perspective that Walter Cronkite and the local newspaper had little interest in covering these movements (or at least not in a sympathetic or fair light).
His statement is humorous, as you point out, when used as a leg of his argument that bookstores are still needed for these social reasons.
The first, I think, is difficult to make because you're saying "hey, this pricing scheme is arbitrary and capricious" when the current model of publishers setting prices for goods seems equally arbitrary. Books are art with little intrinsic value -- if you were to ask me to value a book in my collection, the answer would range from less than a dollar to thousands of dollars, with little in between. I'm not saying demand is a perfect proxy for value, but I think its better than the other options. (I feel the same way about clothes. Any pricing scheme where there's a systematic understanding that everyone is going to discount the hell out of the base price is, I think, a flawed scheme.)
The second, I think is much more valid overall but the same points could be made about Barnes & Noble or Borders, back in the day. (Remember You've Got Mail?)
A much bigger and interesting topic of discussion, I think, is what happens ten years from now when eBooks become the du jour method of literary consumption. Personally, I'm looking forward to the Bandcamp of poetry.
So, Amazon is paying the publisher the wholesale price regardless. Amazon's discounts cut into Amazon's profits, not the publishers -- or even result in Amazon taking a loss.
I think this publisher quoted has to tell us why he "needs" the price on Amazon to be a certain amount, when it does not effect how much he gets paid per copy -- the initial naive interpretation would be that if Amazon wants to cut their profits, so presumably more copies sell, while the publisher is still making the same amount per copy -- this would be good for the publisher, no?
It is a weird market (with Amazon appearing to routinely sell books at a loss), and is dominated by Amazon, which indeed isn't great for a healthy diverse bookselling market.
But publishers are saying some weird stuff, without explaining themselves.
Usualy wholesale price was %40 off retail. Amazon demanded 55% at the time or they wouldn't sell the books. I can imagine some publishers would raise their prices accordingly so that they would still reach the minimum wholesale price they wanted/needed.
Again, "so that the price will then appear closer to what you need it to be?"" -- he's saying he cares what the retail price shown to customers is. That because Amazon is going to sell at less than his marked retail price, he's going to raise the marked retail price, to raise the price that appears to customers.
There might be a reason that matters to his business, but it's definitely not obvious, I wish he'd tell us what it was. He just doesn't want his product to look like it's a cheap bargain product?
It seems like it's right up Google's alley, given their experience with long-tail markets in the advertising business. I hope it's a success.
* The price point. Right now the beta gives me free delivery on everything. So I can order from numerous stores with tiny orders, which is great. But normally it looks like it will cost $4.99 for a one-store delivery, which may not be worth it for me unless I really need something urgent. Amazon Prime will almost always be worth it for me in that case, unless it's something I can't go two days without. Now, maybe if Google came out with a Prime-like one time annual fee for unlimited deliveries...
* The type of products available. Right now, you can't get a lot of the things you would normally go to the store for: perishable food items, alcohol, etc. That takes away a lot of the value of Same Day delivery. Amazon Fresh really has a big edge here, but I guess that's only available in Seattle.
What publishers want is for Amazon to sell at low margin so they get volume and the publishers get each at a decent wholesale price.
As a seller on Amazon I have noticed that often people will pay more than the cheapest available, either they don't bother looking elsewhere or Amazon as a brand has grown to the point where people just find it easiest to use them all the time. If this effect holds for books then they no longer have the be the cheapest to drive decent volume.
Ha, I bet a few were more than concerned.
Ordering a book in US took two weeks or even month, to ship the book to Boston, before Amazon disrupted the broken US book market. While ordering a book in Germany takes a maximum of two days to any bookstore.
One thing the article does not mention is the real price of ordering a book at amazon: Privacy. There had been lots of cases where CIA or FBI visited people because of the books the bought.
If you use an electronic payment method, only 'metadata' — to use an expression in vogue — about the transaction will be transmitted to third parties, not the details of the particular item(s) you purchased.
I think one of the big factors of amazon right from the start in Germany (and probably Austria and France, too, both of which have similar price laws) was that you could get the books to your own address, and that pretty quickly. That combined with the browsing experience (part of which was the novelty) got them established, and later on the expanded product range and the recommendation engine cemented their foothold. So I would say it's not all just about the price, although I'd be very interested to hear about pricing arrangements with the publishers, especially in the early years where they didn't exactly dominate the market.
To me, the biggest boon of amazon was getting English books easily and without a big markup (straight USD/EUR rates, not some fairy tale wiggle factor). Programming books were quite a bit cheaper (German books were almost always hardocover only, and with a fixed price, of course), never mind novels (ages to translate and almost every trilogy becomes a hexalogy in German).
The picture painted here ignores the point of view of the customer completely. Whatever Amazon does is okay with me as long as they successfully exposes Apple + Big Four cartel.
Are there any solid figures on that?
Steve [Jobs] is in the I win/you win school.
Jeff Bezos is in the I win/you lose school.
There really is no difference in the end, both can easily be delivered electronically and both have adherents to the old means of enjoying them; physical copies.