Amazon caves to book publishers

@troopr - Why should a digital book cost the same amount as a physical one? With digital books you can not resell them, you have no distribution or brick and mortar costs. Those saving should be past along to the consumers of that media as the benefit since it would not impact reduce the profit for either the publisher or author.

Let's keep the self-publishing movement growing. If companies can provide high quality services to authors so they can self-publish their books, short stories, etc. this issue with big publisher profits goes away. Authors are in control and the market will dictate the pricing of their works.

It does benefit writers. The whole purpose of the agency model is to price things accurately during a transition. eBooks account for less than 5% of book sales for authors. Physical books represent the actual sales for an author. When amazon subsidizes the kindle books, they effectively force actual physical booksellers out of the market. This in turn removes sales from authors whose main source of income is from hard copy books. The agency model allows publishers to regulate the ebb and flow to help authors during this physical book to eBook transition. Don't believe me? Check out the blogs of real authors like Patrick Rothfuss, Tobias Buckell, Catheryne Valente, etc. I am an aspiring genre fiction writer (not urban fantasy), and I don't hate publishers. Even people like Stephen King still have publishers to work with.

I hate April 1. I never know what to believe. Is this legit? Did the mighty and arrogant Amazon cave once again to publishers?

Why do publishers think we'll pay as much for an ebook as for a discounted hardback, and more than the price for a paperback? Ebooks would take off if they had a more sane pricing model.

This is pathetic. The greedy, scared-stiff (not to mention profoundly stupid) book publishers think they are going to withstand the onslaught of Apple's iPad by raising prices! HAH!

It's curious to see this touted as a prophetic win for Apple/Jobs, when, in fact, it's a loss for consumers.

Wonderful - we get to pay more, regardless of the device.