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2014-11-16 Home Front: Culture Wars

The Amazon Hachette Dispute Comes to a Pyrrhic End

Amazon and Hachette announced a settlement this week in their long festering contractual dispute. I'm glad it's over. As I discussed in a NINC interview last month, the dispute evoked a lot of unnecessary ugliness in certain quarters of the indie author community.

At the heart of the dispute was the Agency pricing model for ebooks, which meant it was a battle was over pricing and margin. According to most press accounts, Hachette wanted the freedom to set consumer prices and earn 70% list for its ebooks, and Amazon wanted to pay Hachette lower margins so it could fund deeper discounting. I covered the dispute back in May here at the Smashwords blog.

According to carefully worded statements this week by Amazon and Hachette - neither of which boasted of victory - Hachette will retain Agency pricing control yet conceded to certain unnamed Amazon demands that will incentivize lower pricing from Hachette.

It's not easy to pick winners and losers. As with most wars, even winners can be losers.

Here's my attempt to examine the winners and losers of this episode, along with speculation on long term implications.
More at the link in the title...

Posted by badanov 2014-11-16 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11134 views ] Top

#1 F*ck them both---charging a price of a printed book for a right to download an electronic copy is highway robbery.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2014-11-16 05:25|| 2014-11-16 05:25|| Front Page Top

#2 Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Nuff said.

Posted by Procopius2k 2014-11-16 07:52|| 2014-11-16 07:52|| Front Page Top

#3 Having to pay a ~~fine fee surcharge~~ tax for not purchasing the book is highway robbery.

Posted by swksvolFF 2014-11-16 11:07|| 2014-11-16 11:07|| Front Page Top

#4 g(r)omgoru, Hachette wanted to price ebooks using high prices. They wanted this to save their hardcopy book revenues from being cannibalized by ebook sales.

Amazon's position was that ebooks have no inventory and other expenses built into hardcopy book prices and the prices should be very low.

Personally I think Hachette was in the wrong in this one.

Posted by rjschwarz 2014-11-16 13:59|| 2014-11-16 13:59|| Front Page Top

#5 Go to Amazon page & look at the prices, rjschwarz.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2014-11-16 14:22|| 2014-11-16 14:22|| Front Page Top

#6 What about this do you not understand? Those prices are set largely by the publisher, not by amazon.

Posted by Call1200 2014-11-16 14:49|| 2014-11-16 14:49|| Front Page Top

#7 Everything should be free, especially music, information, food and gas and I know we can agree that

THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH

Posted by Shipman 2014-11-16 14:55|| 2014-11-16 14:55|| Front Page Top

#8 I shall now ride around the walls of Rantburg in my Triumph. Not waiting for my disciples trying to get I one Accord. Driver! Commence!

Posted by Shipman 2014-11-16 14:58|| 2014-11-16 14:58|| Front Page Top

#9 Fact the first: Information wants to be free.

Fact the second: Information wants to be wrong.

Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2014-11-16 15:51|| 2014-11-16 15:51|| Front Page Top

#10 Fact the third: Information desperately wants to be misspelt and ungrammatically stated, even when correct. So do stories.

Posted by trailing wife 2014-11-16 17:20|| 2014-11-16 17:20|| Front Page Top

#11 Ship, do I have to get the tranq rifle and the isolation cage out - again?

Posted by Pappy 2014-11-16 18:20|| 2014-11-16 18:20|| Front Page Top

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