2 février 2010

“All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend”

I honestly can’t figure out how any of this happened. Also interesting, I read yesterday that Amazon’s new offer to publishers, their incentive for lowering the prices on the Kindle, involved the book publishers not just distributing their e-books through the store, but sub-licensing the publishing itself to Amazon, so that the original publisher all but disappeared from the equation, not even controlling the prices at all anymore. (There’s a difference between agreeing, by contract, that the Kindle version of a book will never be more expensive than other versions, and letting Amazon set the day-to-day price.)

I can understand why that would be tempting for Amazon, but in both of those instances they’re very clearly falling into abuse of dominant position, and not the morally defensible kind (if there’s ever been such a thing).