I thought you were the one in favor of a reverse auction. I'm just suggesting that the same reverse auction can happen without an agency model. Personally, I don't think that a reverse auction would actually improve revenues for sellers.
Or are you saying that you're skeptical that retailers would lower their prices in response to the wholesale price dropping? If that's the issue, well, I do have a fair amount of confidence in market forces making that happen, so long as there are actual retailers. Amazon is in a position to charge a slightly higher price than others, but not a lot higher.
As for your being upset about this... Hell, yes! Anyone in your position would be. Authors are being trampled underfoot here. Readers are hurt, too, but we have much less to lose.
]]>Those are both terrible options for Amazon. If they're just one of many agents, all selling the exact same product for the exact same price, how do they beat their competition? Smoother payment and delivery systems help, but they're not enough. And if e-books are delayed for 7 months, they'll just plain fail as a product.
Amazon's retaliatory move is awfully extreme and is hurting a lot of bystanders. I don't support it, but I do support their position that Macmillan's offer (demand?) is unacceptable. Publisher-fixed pricing or 7 month delays would be bad for Amazon, bad for customers, and (I believe) bad for authors. It might even be bad for the publishers; businesses aren't always great judges of how future market changes will affect them.
I'm sure Amazon would like to remain a retailer but get e-books right away at a low enough price to sell them at $9.99 and still make a profit. But I bet they'd accept being a retailer at higher wholesale prices without retaliation. They'd probably just end up selling those books at a higher price. They already did this with a lot of Tor books. There's one that came out in November I want to read, but it was priced between $14 and $15, so I skipped it. As a consumer, that's my choice, too.
Finally, on reverse auctions. You don't need the agency model for that. Since e-books don't require having an inventory the publisher can just drop the wholesale price whenever it wants, and let retailers decide how to respond with retail price changes. If an e-book's wholesale price started out the same as the hardcover price, then dropped by $2, then $2 more, the retail price would probably start out a bit below hardcover (it's cheaper for the retailer to fulfill an e-book order) then drop commensurately. That might or might not be good business for the publisher and author, but the market would eventually sort it out.
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