Tag Archives: Amazon

Articles I Like: Remember Amazon is always the bad guy

PolyWogg.ca
May 1 2012

The NYTimes had an interesting article on Sunday from David Carr writing about an author, Buzz Bissinger, who had a book promotion going on with Apple that Amazon matched and thus must somehow be evil.

…Apple, which had been looking to get into shorter works in a digital format, decided to include e-books in a promotion that it does with Starbucks. It selected Mr. Bissinger’s digital sequel as a Pick of the Week, giving customers a code they could redeem online for the book. (Mr. Bissinger said he still received a royalty of $1.50 for each copy sold.)

Amazon interpreted the promotion as a price drop and lowered its price for “After Friday Night Lights” to exactly zero. Byliner withdrew the book from Amazon’s shelves, saying it did so to “protect our authors’ interest.”

…

Mr. Bryant, who formerly edited a sports magazine for The New York Times, said that Amazon’s “price bot” had picked up the fact that the book was being given away as part of a weeklong promotion and responded by dropping its price to zero. (In an e-mail later, Mr. Bryant said that when the company told Amazon about the promotion, before it began, Byliner was warned the price might drop to zero.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: The Threat of Free Riders

PolyWogg.ca
April 23 2012

The Harvard Business Review has a great website, combining not only the articles from their magazine, but daily summaries of key articles, interesting statistics and a number of cool blogs ranging from “soft” HR issues to “hard” business articles. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss wrote a blog entry called, “Target and the Threat of Free Riders” that is pretty good. I know what you’re thinking — umm, doesn’t the heading for this blog entry say it’s about “publishing”? Yes, yes, it does. Because while Frei and Morriss are primarily talking about Target, the hidden subtext behind it is Amazon.

You might remember the big kerfuffle at Christmas time…Amazon released a new App that could scan bar codes, and they encouraged you while shopping in bricks and mortar stores to do some price comparisons. And then, *gasp*, buy from Amazon if the price was cheaper. They even had the audacity to offer initial discount coupons to those using the apps. The blogs exploded with stories of how Amazon was evil, how dare they do this, it was destroying the local infrastructure. They were essentially complaining that Amazon was being a “free rider” — the store chains have physical locations with large overhead costs they have to pay, and here Amazon was saying “go visit them, touch and feel your items in person, exploit their overhead, and then buy from us.”… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Critics of E-Books Lawsuit

PolyWogg.ca
April 23 2012

The Wall Street Journal has a pretty good article by Thomas Catan entitled Critics of E-Books Lawsuit Miss the Mark, Experts Say (link may expire). In it, Catan gives a pretty good overview of the Ebook “collusion” lawsuit and has some outstanding points about those who think the Department of Justice “got it wrong” (i.e. they went after the wrong company) and are really just puppets of Amazon:

U.S. antitrust law doesn’t seek to protect little companies against big ones, or even struggling ones against successful ones. Companies can grow as large as they want, as long as they do it through lower prices, better service or niftier innovations. Companies can even become monopolies, as long as they don’t get there illegally or try to extend their power by unlawfully stifling competition.

…

“Price fixing is kind of the first-degree murder of antitrust violations,” Prof. Hovenkamp says. “They don’t have discretion to just walk away from what appears to be a strong set of facts that, if true, are one of the most central of antitrust violations.”

…

The government might already have shown some leniency. For one, the Justice Department brought a civil, rather than a criminal, case, so no executives will go to prison.

… Read the rest