Salon.com > Scott Turow http://www.salon.com Mon, 20 May 2013 02:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Scott Turow on why we should fear Amazon http://www.salon.com/2012/03/13/scott_turow_on_why_we_should_fear_amazon/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/13/scott_turow_on_why_we_should_fear_amazon/#comments Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:20:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12670861 Late last week, the Justice Department warned Apple and five of the nation's largest publishers that it was planning to sue them for price fixing. At issue is the agency model, a method of wholesaling e-books in which the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer takes a 30 percent cut. Most print and many e-books are sold under the traditional wholesale model, in which publishers sell books at a discounted price, and the retailer can resell them for whatever price it likes.

The unnamed player in this drama is Amazon, which had been selling e-books at a loss until two years ago, when the iPad came along and publishers used the emergence of the new device to pressure the online megaretailer into adopting the agency model, too. If Amazon wanted to sell e-books from the Big Six (as the six largest book publishers are called), it could no longer sell those titles for $9.99.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/13/scott_turow_on_why_we_should_fear_amazon/feed/ 106