This is another reason the lawyer that wrote the amicus is full of crap.

Lots of shouldacouldawoulda in that article in support of the supposed “predatory pricing” and no facts. The second paragraph admits that pretty much no economists believe there even is such a thing. This is the same logic that gave us “net neutrality”, except even worse.

I’m typing this from an Ubuntu 12.04 install with Chromium v18.0 while also running some tests on my software in Eclipse Juno via OpenJDK. The software I described there cost man-millennia in labor to produce, yet I obtained it, and every other piece of software currently residing on this machine at the discount price of $0. It costs quite a bit more than $0 to make the software I listed, but somehow software does fine. And neither I not even the developers for the software would be happy if you muscled in and told me that I had to pay for the software at a price you specified.

They and the small publishers which share the platform make a *huge* amount of their profit from epublishing. Completely DRM free, cross-platform, etc. – also monthly bundles, reasonable prices, “snippets” of certain books, etc.

Heck, they sell unedited ARC’s for a premium, and people pay it!

(Personally I have a Kobo and only buy DRM-free ebooks…)

The reality is that Amazon’s market share in ebooks outside America has been taking some nasty hits from the Nook and Kobo (who for example have a majority of the hardware market in France and Canada) lately.

Things are fragmenting, the problem is very much publishers holding prices to random, in an echo of the old UK Net Book Agreement, which held prices for books artificially high for a decade and prevented i.e. softbacks from being published here.

Does this involve investment on their part? Sure. Is it possibly risky? Sure. But I don’t really care about that. If customers are feeling like they’re getting screwed by a supposed monopoly (and we could certainly get into whether there are actually any monopolies, which is definitely an open question), then there’s the opportunity for a new provider. Make it work, and quit bitching.

Big publisher mouthpiece. Lars Ulrich for the literary set.

Still, it’s a nice change of pace from regular amicus briefs. I can’t think of any bluebook rules it violated offhand. Perhaps improper footnoting (not at the bottom of the page).

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/understanding-amazons-strategy.html

–on Amazon’s part that–

But it should be noted that this marginal cost is arbitrary in a way that traditional marginal costs are not.

It takes $x worth of steel to make a washing machine. at ny given point in time there is not a whole lot that washing machine mfgrs can do to change that.

In this case, the publishers set the marginal cost and they purposely set it high so that can charge predatory pricing on Amazon’s that then excuses collusion on the part of the publishers. Using antitrust law to actively promote collusion among the big-market-share producers. It is like judicial ju-jitsu! Side to S.D.N.Y.: You’re getting played, brother (but you probably knew that).

Upthd I mentioned that 99 cent game theory book i read on my kindle a moth or so back. I guaran-darn-tee you that that RIT grad student (don’t even remember the fella’s name) wasn’t charging a ten dollar royalty. and he isn’t the one who hired Bob to write his smug lil comic strip neither.

Oh, well. At least it made our Eapen chuckle.

Pretty much that, but the royalties run higher than you’d expect. The publishers often charge retailers $8-$10 per license, meaning Amazon was losing money on many of those $7.99 books it used to sell.

What is the cost of designing and mas marketing a thingee like the Kindle Fire? I don’t know, but the answer has got to be enormous. When you spread that enormous cost over the sale of an enormous quantity of book sales then it becomes smaller, but how much smaller? Bob says that not enough of this cost is showing up in the price of Amazon eBooks because Amazon is engaging in predatory pricing. I am saying that I think that is hogwash.

Mostly I am worried that Bob’s amici brief is a sophisticated play to keep low margin authors out of the eBook game and to keep publisher’s in the eBook game.

One response that one might have to my concern about “independent authors” would be to say that if they are chased off the Kindle platform, then they can still set up their own independent eStores and sell to me and my wife (and others similarly inclined) over our plain old WINDOWS computers. That could happen in theory, but I don’t think it will happen in reality — in fact I KNOW it won’t. This is why I feel so strongly about wanting these authors on the Kindle, and I don’t want the likes of Bob chasing them off using naff antitrust theories.

Still, in the end Bob will probably win. Even among supposedly-economically-oriented libertarians there is just too little knowledge about antitrust law, and too small of a value placed on true consumer choice. I think the perception is that the things I am pontificating about on this here thd is just Crazy Old Burgers being crazy again.

“Its gotta be Burgers” ™

It costs more than $14.99 to write a great book. If you want to get a feel for what it costs, I would recommend: (i) In the end you end of becoming yourself anyway by David Foster Wallace; and (ii) Down and out in Paris & London by George Orwell.

That sed, MikeV hits it on the hed when he sez “marginal cost,” and this is also what I ment upthd when I said that “marginal cost” (in the context of eBooks, is a highly manipulable construct. Bob’s comic book style brief itself is part of the marginal costs (sadly), and if the lady in the comic had mentioned that, then the comic would have gone “meta” and it would have been a much better comic.

I cannot believe that we are actually having an antitrust thd on the Adge — I have waited years for this — thank you so much, Eapen!

Here be the theory, such as it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

And if Amazon is selling books below their marginal cost, how is that hurting consumers?

I suppose that’s why he talks about piracy in the amicus brief, but it still strikes me as odd to claim that Amazon is selling small text files for $14.99 at “below cost”.

I am not a graphic novels type of guy generally, but Alan Moore transcends the genre in a way that Bob can’t seem to.

Glancing back over the document, I note this argument: “e-books are systems goods — no value to consumers in isolation”. This is exactly what RMS and other DRM opponents have been warning for years, and now a lawyer in the employ of the publishers has admitted it. Sure, consumers should be smart enough not to spend their money on DRMed goods, but this frank admission should cut off a lot of nonsense.