Amazon Will Change Its Ebook Contracts With Publishers as EU Ends Antitrust Probe (theverge.com) 29
The EU has reached an agreement with Amazon following an antitrust investigation into the company's ebook business. From a report: In 2015, the European Commission began a probe into the licensing deals Amazon was making with publishers, suggesting that the US giant was forcing them into unfair contracts that stifled competition in Europe's 1 billion Euro ($1.09 billion) ebook market. In January, Amazon suggested a number of changes it would make to its contracts, and the EU now says it's happy to accept them, bringing a close to the investigation. The parts of the contract the EU objected to were a number of "most-favored-nation" clauses. These required any publishers doing a deal with Amazon to reveal the terms of the contracts they made with rival distributers. Amazon could then demand that it got the same deal (or better) on things like ebook prices, agency commissions, promotion campaigns, and release dates.
Just stop (Score:2)
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Your comment starts with "charging more for the Ebook than you do for the paperback!" and that makes no sense.
Under the wholesale model, Amazon charged $9.99 for most ebook titles to take market share away from other ebook retailers. Apple forced the industry to adopt the agency model that let publishers — not retailers — to set the ebook price. What some traditional publishers have done was to keep ebooks prices higher than paperbacks or hardbacks to protect their print business.
http://publishingtrendsetter.com/industryinsight/simple-explanation-agency-model/ [publishing...setter.com]
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The issue is that print doesn't cost a lot more money. You'd think that warehousing, printing, etc., would add a ton to the p
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You'd think that warehousing [...]
According to my college English instructor in the early 1990's, the Reagan Administration raised taxes on warehouses in general and book warehouses in particular. Publisher used to print one million books, warehouse them and sell them as needed. After the warehouse tax went into effect, it was no longer viable for publishers to store books for years at a time. If a bookstore sends back books that don't sell, it's cheaper for the publisher to pulp them. It's one of the reasons why print books have a short sh
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Your college English instructor didn't know the Reagan Administration ended in January 1989?
You're aware that the Reagan tax reform with "revenue enhancements" took place in 1986? My instructor didn't tell me the story until I was in college in the early 1990's.
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Don't like the price? Just download it as a DRM-free PDF then.
That's pretty much how it works for movies/TV: if someone tries charging more than a couple of bucks for an HD rental, people will torrent* it instead. (* = or view a hijacked stream for live sports)
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charging more for the Ebook than you do for the paperback! I feel like I'm personally financing Blue Origin!
Talk to the publishers. They are the ones that forced the agency model on ebooks. So unlike physical books (which use the wholesale model), the publisher sets the price for ebooks, not Amazon.
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I would have expected the publishers to prefer e-book sales over paperback. A paperback book can be sold second hand, lent to family or friends etc. An e-book with DRM (which I think includes the vast majority of these from large publishers) is tied to the e-reader and to lend the book you would have to lend the whole e-reader and they cannot be sold second hand.
I sense a purge coming soon. (Score:2)
Purge? what Purge? (Score:4, Interesting)
What is this 'DRM' thingy [wordpress.com] you seem to be afraid of ?
(Note: I legally obtain the book I'm DeDRM-ing.
I'm just removing the DRM because I'm fed up with the Adobe Digital Edition fucking things up on a regular basis and access to my book getting b0rked yet again.
This kind of De-DRM-ing is actually tolerated in my local jurisdiction - as it should be everywhere)
Stifled competition.. (Score:2)
Re:Stifled competition.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Soo.. they say Amazon stifled competition.. but the parts of their contracts that they objected to were the "show us your other deals and give us the same deal" clauses that keeps prices consistent across retailers and prevents publishers from making sweetheart deals like they did with Apple. I don't see how that stifle's competition, per se.
Because this is price fixing.
I had a friend who is an independently published author. There are some e-book publishers that, on occasion, run sales: they will offer her book for, say 99 cents for a week as a promotion.
Amazon has a robot that trolls the web watching the price of e-books from competitors. If the robot finds a book offered for less than the Amazon price anywhere, at any time, Amazon will pull the book off of Amazon because their contract says nobody else is allowed to sell it for less.
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Then there are the sleazoids that just repackage public domain stuff (Wikipedia articles, books from Project Gutenberg) and sell it at high prices.
My favorite repeat offender is Stephen King. If you're not familiar with the bibliography for the REAL Stephen King, you might accidentally buy one of these ebooks. Not sure how this person can get around the safeguards that Amazon has in place. Several my ebooks got flagged because I name dropped Stephen King in the tags.
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Amazon has a robot that trolls the web watching the price of e-books from competitors. If the robot finds a book offered for less than the Amazon price anywhere, at any time, Amazon will pull the book off of Amazon because their contract says nobody else is allowed to sell it for less.
If you're not a member of the KDP Select program, which requires that you pull your ebooks from other retailers, you can't price your ebooks for free on Amazon. I used to trick the Amazon robot into setting some of my ebooks to free by having them for free elsewhere and then informing Amazon of the lower price. That trick doesn't work anymore.
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Why would you want to pay Amazon to help you give away free books?
I don't pay Amazon anything on a FREE ebook. A 30% cut on a FREE ebook is nothing.
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Quite the contrary, that clause is the precise reason why the publishers had sweetheart deals with Apple.
As you suggested, a Most Favored Nation (MFN) clause generally isn't a problem. The problem comes from when you pair MFN with agency pricing (i.e. publishers set the prices while retailers take a cut), because it prevents retailers from competing on price for reasons that aren't obvious at a first glance. Rather than trying to explain it in abstract, let me just run through the Apple vs. Amazon situation
Interesting but probably irrelevant... (Score:2)