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Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Cheap Reads!
  You're talking about principle: I'm talking about practice. Amazon has engaged in dumping: paying publishers $X for ebooks, selling them to customers at $X-n, paying the n margin out of their own operating budget, specifically to build market share by undercutting rival ebook stores and also to establish $x-n as the "right" price for ebooks in the public eye, eventually forcing the publishers to cut their margin and supply books to AMZN at that price. It's true that Amazon mostly runs on a very narrow margin -- but over a period of years they invested several hundred million dollars in...
• Charlie Stross commented on Cheap Reads!
  The kindle software is available for most platforms, while amazon could make it difficult to access it from other devices they actually haven't. Amazon appear to be using the cloud storage as method of keeping customer loyalty, That's only part of it. Back in the 00's, market research I saw for Computer Shopper indicated that 75% of punters who bought a PC through an ad in that magazine never installed any software on it -- the process of buying and installing shrinkwrap software was too intimidating. Today, the curated smartphone app store has broken that barrier -- but buying content...
• Brett Dunbar commented on Cheap Reads!
  Dumping is pretty rare, as genuine dumping is self limiting, allegations of dumping however are fairly common. Amazon ended up with nearly all of the market fairly, Microsoft abandoned it very early and no one else made much effort to enter. As a bookshop Amazon didn't attempt to make money with hardware, selling the kindle at about cost, believing that once someone had a cheap e reader they would eventually start to purchase content....
• Brett Dunbar commented on Cheap Reads!
  Squeezing suppliers into providing their product at a lower cost is not normally a matter of concern to competition authorities. The Restrictive Practices Court is fairly focussed on the interests of consumers practices that raise prices are generally held to be unlawful as contrary to the interests of consumers, practices which lower sales prices are not. Apple's scheme was an attempt to impose retail price management which is generally unlawful, Amazon choosing to discount the price charged to consumers was not....
• slamble commented on Cheap Reads!
  Squeezing suppliers into providing their product at a lower cost is not normally a matter of concern to competition authorities.It is (or should be) when the purchaser is effectively a monopsony, or near to one. There are plenty of examples of suppliers being squeezed by, for example, Walmart to the point where they went out of business, because they couldn't keep up with the never-ending demands for more and more ever-cheaper products. It would not surprise me if that's the sort of direction Bezos was intending to take Amazon's ebook business....