Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 133 posts

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#61

Post by nnutter »

bsder wrote: post #57
IgorPartola wrote: post #31

While I believe they saw these numbers, specifically that lowering the price from $15 to $10 lead to a 74% increase in purchases, I don't believe that this is a good general rule of thumb. Here's the problem: there are only so many potential ebook readers out in the world, and they only have so much time. This means there will be market saturation at some point, or at least market movement. This elasticity is there,…

> specifically that lowering the price from $15 to $10 lead to a 74% increase in purchases So, if Amazon takes $5, then whoever provided the book lost money on that deal. (Profit went from $10 to $5 while sales did not double ). In fact, if Amazon takes more than about $4, it's a wash (which is actually a loss because some of those 75% more customers would likely have bought the book later at a different price point)…

Your math/model doesn't make sense. Business is never altruistic. Amazon justifies 30% because they are the gatekeeper to millions of Kindle users.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#62

Post by lotsofmangos »

WalterSear wrote: post #8

Books aren't video games. People don't collect them. I don't consider a game I don't finish to be a failure, a waste of my time. I do so a book. Despite Amazon's talking points, they are relatively price inelastic. Perhaps, right now, they aren't, since people are still dealing with market novelty, but over the long term, time is a bigger sink than money, when it comes to books.

time is a bigger sink than money, when it comes to books

I'm reading less at the moment than I used to, but I regularly have periods of reading around three novels a week. If it were not for the existence of libraries and second hand book stores, I would find money to be a far bigger restriction than time, especially when I was a teenager.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#63

Post by lotsofmangos »

joshAg wrote: post #10
WalterSear wrote: post #8

Books aren't video games. People don't collect them. I don't consider a game I don't finish to be a failure, a waste of my time. I do so a book. Despite Amazon's talking points, they are relatively price inelastic. Perhaps, right now, they aren't, since people are still dealing with market novelty, but over the long term, time is a bigger sink than money, when it comes to books.

Well, this was a horrible way to discover that I'm not a people. If I stop collecting books, can I become a people? Is there like a specific process or licensing body?

I dunno. You could ask the firemen, they'll be able to tell you.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#64

Post by jamesaguilar »

lotsofmangos wrote: post #54
bsder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your evidence that this isn't a zero-sum game, is, exactly, what? All of the evidence points to the fact that people have more than sufficient entertainment options and have set their budgets at a fixed point. It wasn't piracy that killed music. It was the fact that the prime purchasers of music had a fixed entertainment budget and switched to buying video games aka. zero-sum market.

And your evidence that this isn't a zero-sum game, is, exactly, what? Me probably. And all the folk I know with reading habits like mine who have not bothered getting an ebook reader yet, despite having problems seeing the floor for books sometimes. edit - I think Amazon are complete and utter [redacted] over DRM, the 1984 debacle, their general attitude, etc. That said, I think they are probably right that everyone…

FYI, the book publishers compelled amazon to use drm. Where the publishers allow it, they distribute books free of drm.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#65

Post by pyoung »

jmedefind wrote: post #23
fpgeek wrote: post #20

I'm a bit surprised that Amazon said listed "no returns" as one of the differences with ebooks. I have personal experience with their incredibly generous ebook return policy (right in line with their other generous return policies). Is this an implicit admission that Amazon is eating the cost of those returns? Or do they mean something specific like the physical infrastructure for returns?

When I worked at a bookstore we would ship boxes full of un-sold books back to the publishers every month (Mostly consisting of cheap Romance novels). I imagine having to track and handle all of that to be a major cost to publishers.

I believe I re-call an internet comment (most likely on HN) about how some publishers would instruct bookstores to shred the unsold copies. Apparently it was cheaper than shipping them back and trying to re-sell them somewhere else.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#66

Post by jamesaguilar »

bsder wrote: post #51
jamesaguilar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, why would Amazon care so much about how others market their content, to the point of trying to interfere? They make $3 on every sale, so obviously it is in their interest to set the price to maximize revenue. Your whole bit about "everyone doing it" and "race to the bottom" is an instance of the zero-sum fallacy.

And your evidence that this isn't a zero-sum game, is, exactly, what? All of the evidence points to the fact that people have more than sufficient entertainment options and have set their budgets at a fixed point. It wasn't piracy that killed music. It was the fact that the prime purchasers of music had a fixed entertainment budget and switched to buying video games aka. zero-sum market.

At a minimum, books can compete against other forms of entertainment. Books can also compete against other types of consumption, like cars, food and houses. Until I see some compelling evidence that the book market writ large is of a fixed volume, regardless of price, I assume that the size is dynamic, like almost every other market.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#67

Post by walterbell »

larrys wrote: post #37
jonnathanson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only do people collect books, but in fact, more people collect books than read them. A lot more! I'd bet your average book consumer, with rows and rows of beautiful, trendy, or important books on his shelves, has read maybe 10% of those tomes. If that. 10% is probably a generous figure. Even true bibliophiles have read maybe 25-50% of their books. There is a long and well-known phenomenon in the publishing world,…

God know I still have all the O'Reilly books dating back to the 90's that I refuse to throw out. (They are in a back room not on a bookshelf although they were on a bookshelf at my old office mid 00). But here's the thing. How do you do that with ebooks? No physical object to collect. Much different. Nothing to display.

Maybe goodreads or librarything? They seem to have a lot of users, not sure about the social dynamics.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#68

Post by fpgeek »

bsder wrote: post #53
chatmasta wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know exactly what you mean by market saturation in this case, as your logic seems to imply that each book has a finite market of N customers, and enough of a subset of them, M , are willing to pay $1000 (or whatever), such that M (1000) > N (5). The error in your logic is that the size of the market for a given book actually depends on the price of that book. There's millions of books out there. Why would I p…

> Why would I pay $1000 for one when I can get so many others for $5? Because market data suggests that most people won't switch. They will buy book from "the new, hip writer X" or they won't buy at all . Someone who intends to buy something by Malcolm Gladwell is unlikely to buy something from somebody else just because it's a little cheaper. Amazon wants to maximize sales volume whereas the distributors and authors…

> Because market data suggests that most people won't switch. They will buy book from "the new, hip writer X" or they won't buy at all.

Which is why publishers don't care whether or not stores like Amazon discount their physical books.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#69

Post by gknoy »

WalterBright wrote: post #16
krschultz wrote: post #2

For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. That seems like a hard won data point, I'm surprised they threw it out to the public…

Sure. I buy books by the bushel at $1 each (from ebay). I buy almost none at $14.99.

That sounds like an interesting model. Do you have tips you'd be willing to share? I wouldn't mind having books to read which I won't mind my young kids destroying accidentally.

Re: Amazon/Hachette Business Interruption

#70

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #16
krschultz wrote: post #2

For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. That seems like a hard won data point, I'm surprised they threw it out to the public…

Sure. I buy books by the bushel at $1 each (from ebay). I buy almost none at $14.99.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN