Amazon’s Bezos Gambles Consumers Won’t Budge Amid Supplier Spats (Business Week)
Jeff Bezos is betting consumers are so hooked on Amazon.com Inc’s easy shopping and fast delivery that they won’t revolt even as negotiations with suppliers make it harder to find some items on the site.
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How to Use Social Media for Better Book Recommendations (Book Riot)
In the height of summer reading season, everyone is looking for the next hot book to read. And they’re all on Facebook asking what they should get next. If you’ve tried this route you may have noticed that you get all kinds of titles shouted at you from the peanut gallery with little rhyme or reason.
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Average Price of an eBook Best-Seller on the Rise (Digital Book World)
For two years, we’ve been tracking the average price of a top-25 best-selling ebook.
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Executor of Orwell’s Estate Calls Amazon Out on Misquoting the Author (GalleyCat)
Earlier this week, Amazon sent out a letter to Kindle readers defending the low price of its eBooks, quoting George Orwell’s perception of paperbacks in its defense.
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Kindle Daily Deal: National Security (and others)
Bestseller book prices rising? No, that cannot be! The DOJ has intervened at great cost and a judge has spoken. “Doing that is illegal” they say with a sneer. So it must not be happening. It can’t be happening. All this is a lie–or perhaps an illusion created by that evil Big Five again.
Quite frankly, the Big Five publishers can raise bestseller books prices into the stratosphere for all I care. I find something vaguely disgusting about reading a book just because it is on some list. It’s a bit like joining a long line just because it is a long line and without knowing what is at the front of that line. When I hear what most bestselling fiction is about, I wonder, “Why would anyone want to read that?” People must live dreadful lives to want to read that sort of thing.
Now if the DOJ would go after law firms for collusion and conspiracy, I’d be interested. Lawyers do engage in a conspiracy of sorts. If one lawyer sends you a nasty cease and desist letter, you have to hire another lawyer, at hundreds of dollars an hour, to tell you the letter is bosh.
And try to sue a lawyer for harassment. Yes, you can file a grievance with a state agency. But it’s run by lawyers and has no interest in changing the status quo. I actually filed a grievance against an ill-temper Manhattan lawyer I referred to as the Junk Yard Dog. The refusal to do anything that I got from that NY state agency tasked with evaluating such things was, I kid you not, literally rubber stamped.
Yes, I would love a DOJ that spent about 75% of its time suing law firms. That would do our society an immense good. In comparison to that, picking on publishers, whatever their size, seems pointless and, as this bit of news indicates, useless.
Raising prices is not illegal. Happens all the time.
Raising prices at the same time your “competition” raises prices is. Especially when they email and phone call trail between you and your competition says “Hey, we’re doing this.” “So are we!” That is collusion, which is illegal, and thats what the DOJ sued the PF 6 for.
But I’m not surprised you choose to overlook that detail