Via Scoop.it – Writing and reading fiction
By keeping e-book prices high, the Big Six book publishers are not only getting less money from their books in many cases, but they are also fuelling piracy and pushing readers away — all of which is giving Amazon even more ammunition to use…
Via gigaom.com
Filed under: publishing
C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m 
Actually, I would say that the problem for consumers is that the agency agreement has eliminated competition on price *and raised the price over what it used to be.* ITunes also uses an agency model where the prices are set by publishers, but you tend not to hear the same kind of complaints about lack of competition on price with respect to song tracks because people generally accept that these prices are reasonable. Similarly, if the publishers introduced agency pricing a priced new bestsellers at $9, no one would complain about lack of price competition; people would complain about how Amazon has ripped them off for years with its $10 pricing. So I don’t think that most people who complain about agency pricing are actually complaining about the agency part of the price. They are complaining about the price part of the price.