The Price of Amazon 298
An anonymous reader writes "As physical book stores continue to struggle and disappear, the NY Times puts the changing book industry into perspective as a cost of the existence of Amazon. Further, it's a cost that hasn't been fully paid, as other effects of Amazon's ascendancy have yet to be felt. Quoting: 'One consequence of this shift is that soon no one will know what a book's "real" price is. Price will be determined by demand and perhaps by whim. The first seeds of this can be seen in the Justice Department's suit against the leading publishers, who felt that Amazon was pricing their e-books so low that it threatened their viability. The government accused the publishers of colluding to raise prices in an anti-consumer move. Amazon was not a party to the case, but it emerged the big winner.' Economists, publishers, and readers no longer have confidence that a book will cost the same amount this week as it did the last."
Re:one word ... (Score:5, Informative)
If you want old books, Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] might be worth your time.
No mention of the other costs? (Score:2, Informative)
A Financial Times photographer visits an Amazon fulfillment center in England. [fastcodesign.com] This is what your one-click purchases are doing to people.
Re:No mention of the other costs? (Score:5, Informative)
As I said to the other guy ... you haven't worked very many menial jobs in your life have you?
Re:Does this mean anything? (Score:3, Informative)
and this sort of personalized pricing is not happening on amazon. it might start happening some time in the future, but right now everybody sees the same price for an item. they may increase or decrease the price suddenly/rapidly, but the change applies to everyone.
Re:New technology makes old technology obsolete. (Score:5, Informative)
It was an up sell item on computer systems.
This is the real reason for the ridiculous pricing of cables. Stores don't sell a lot of cables and customers who are only buying a cable are rare, so competing on cable pricing doesn't make any sense.
They jack up the prices on cables because they know that they can often sell them to customers who are buying computers, televisions or other expensive products that the store does have to compete on pricing with. The profit margin on the expensive item will be fairly low, so they want a variety of high profit margin add-ons like cables and extended warranties that they can push the customer to buy.
Re:one word ... (Score:3, Informative)
Biggest cost to running a bookstore is actually labour.
I sell about 3million $ of books at mine, and labour is the number one cost, then rent, then shipping.
Re:Let us all shed a tear... (Score:4, Informative)
You're ignoring the other costs of buying books.
Yes, they should be cheaper than regular books by about half, but they're still a good deal even at the same price as regular books. The main problem is that there's tons of book stores out there, and there's relatively few stores for ebooks. And if you're foolish enough to buy a Kindle, that leaves you mainly with Amazon, versus pretty much everybody else using epubs.
Anyways, there's storage considerations for the books you buy, the gas to get to the store, the shipping if you don't go to the shop, if it's a book you use frequently it wears out. And when you're going on vacation, it can be costly to bring a collection of books with you.
Personally, I only get rid of books due to space limitations, and with ebooks, I've never felt deprived by not having the ability to sell it.