Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

“So do you raise the price, knowing they’re going to lower it, so that the price will then appear closer to what you need it to be?"

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.

It's been a couple of years, but I used to work at a place that published a number of books.

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.

Why do books carry a printed retail price anyway? Is there a reason why they can't be like CDs and other goods?

Apparently to (try to) guarantee the survival of books shops: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price_agreement

That make sense -- negotiating a higher wholesale price with Amazon, sometimes by raising your retail price cause of Amazon's fixed discount -- but is not what the publisher quoted appears to be talking about.

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?

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