Cui Bono? The Kindle

John Scalzi makes a clear case that Amazon’s determination to subsidize the Kindle is coming at the expense of Authors’s and their Publishers:

This asinine jockeying over electronic book prices has very little to do with what’s actually good or useful for anyone other than the manufacturer of a piece of hardware… who also happens to be a book retailer.

Since this model is the same one as is used by cell phone providers, we come back to Stan Collender’s question of two weeks ago:

That begs an interesting question about my existing phone and contract: Since my existing phone was paid for over the past 24 months, why doesn’t my current Verizon bill fall by the monthly amount that was priced in to my payment 2 years ago? Isn’t that a rip-off as well?

Yes. It’s called monopoly profits.

UPDATE: Charlie Stross correctly piles on:

Amazon.com can kiss my ass. Shorter version: they’re engaging in monopolistic practices that damn well ought to be illegal, in an attempt to use their near-monopoly position to fuck over authors and bring publishers to heel.

Which is more concise than what I said below. That’s why he gets, and earns, the Big Bucks (well, Quintessential Quid, in his case).

UPDATE 2: Via Felix’s Twitter feed, Marion Maneker at The Big Money corrects Henry Blodgett:

Books are, within reasonable limits, demand-inelastic. Just as movies are. Demand comes from the quality or popularity of the book, not the price. We know this because the great transformation of the book business over the last two decades has been to shift readers from mass-market paperbacks to hardcovers sold at discounted but still higher prices. Readers have been paying more for James Patterson and Dan Brown, not waiting for the cheaper mass market paperbacks.

Consumers trade money for time. And publishers should have the freedom to set their prices at what the market will bear, not what suits Amazon’s–or Apple’s–needs.

The pricing pressure in books comes not from customer demand but from retailers fighting over market share. That’s what Barnes & Noble (BKS) did to independent bookstores and Costco did to Barnes & Noble. Now Amazon’s doing it Costco with the Kindle.

Via Patrick, of course.