Many growth companies show little short term profit, as they invest in infrastructure for growth or use tight margins to build their customer base.

And the endgame may well be to renegotiate more favorable deals with publishers, but the middle game currently appears to be to encourage authors to disintermediate and self-publish their books directly to Amazon (while retaining copyright, and the right to also offer their books through other sellers). There appear to be a number of authors who are quite successful with this strategy, mostly previous unknowns.

Perhaps this will ultimately prove terrible for authors, but it’s also possible that it will prove to be just fine for authors and bad merely for publishers.

We don’t really know how onerous/limiting that would be for a retailer. We have little-to-no data on how it would actually work; it’s just so early. I’m not sure though that it would be a major concession if a retailer is primarily interested in discounting new frontlist titles.

http://abovethelaw.com/2012/09/why-write-an-amicus-brief-when-you-can-draw-one-instead/2/

As though the old publishing model in which the publisher retained all the rights and gave a pittance to the author was really in the author’s interest.

This about sums up the silly notion that the traditional publishers are the author’s natural friend.

http://libertarianstandard.com/2012/04/12/ebook-price-fixing-and-bad-journalism/

The argument around Amazon becoming a monopoly is born by those who cling hopelessly to DRM (guess what? it doesn’t work!). For those people, I’d encourage them follow the Tor model and go DRM free. Then you can sell from wherever you like (on the publisher’s site, the author’s, fans’) onto any device the consumer has. Adapt or die.

The fact that ebook “retailers” incur no marginal costs is the whole point of the agency model. For price competition to be sustainable and meaningful it must also be accompanied by competition to lower costs. When there are no costs there can be no cost competition.

But, because it’s unreasonable to expect people to work for free, e-retailers instead receive a commission.

But, logic has lost.

The DOJ says that’s OK period. The requirement that money must be made across the entire list was optional at the publisher’s discretion (read: if the publisher can somehow get the retailers to agree to it)

Is there any word on if Harper Collins actually implemented this anywhere? It appears all ebookstores are discounting HC titles now, even Apple (actually, Apple has been offering some of the steepest discounts).

My guess going in was that if a publisher tried to bargain for this sort of program, Barnes and Noble and Kobo would probably be the only takers- Apple, Amazon, and Google want to use their cash stockpiles- and the publisher would need to offer B&N and Kobo something in return for participating.