Yeah, Amazon is going to be all kinds of sad when their showrooms, aka B&N, start closing.

Yeah, Amazon talked Steve Jobs into conspiring with the Book Publishers in violation of the anti-trust laws to fix prices. That nasty Jeff Bezos just forced Jobs and the publishers to break the law. What a tiresome whinny asshole you are Constant.

Whinny asshole? Does that make you a horse's ass?

Amazon didn't stop publishers from charging whatever they wanted for ebooks. Those publishers can charge amazon whatever they want. What they sued to stop was _price fixing_, an anti-consumer practice where a company tries to dictate not just the price that they charge the retailer for the item, but also what the retailer then charges the customer..taking away the retailer's right to decide what markup they want.

@4 For those reading, that is all true, but the missing key information is that Amazon's markup was a negative number designed to impoverish its competitors. Amazon has the amazing freedom to be huge and not make a profit - its shareholder culture allows this the way they do not with other companies.

I find it so funny that ebooks end up costing $10-15 in the publisher's mind, and so often they're horribly typeset compared to a paper book.

That Triump of the City book Mudede was rambling about this morning. $13.99 to have a 352 page paperback copy delivered to me. $10.99 for the Kindle digital copy (that's probably all of 1-2 megabytes). I know not everyone is self-publishing but the physical item and delivery alone should mean the Kindle version is even more profit for the publisher than paperbacks.

Update: After posting this, Barnes & Noble told us that it did not eliminate its entire hardware department, but it declined to provide specifics.

@2: No, It was Bezos talking to Jobs.
First: There was NEVER any substantial evidence of collusion (the legal word you're looking for); the whole DOJ case was built around the fact that in NY publishing, *people in the industry get together at restaurants and bars and talk business*-- the allegation was that there was some power-lunch where the Big Six all sat down to hatch the plot. That's it. No smoking gun email or piece of paper being definitive.
Why did the publishers lose? They DIDN'T. They settled. Why? It wasn't guilt, it was the fact that the legal costs to maintain the case would stagger the houses. It's why the head of Macmillan didn't capitulate and held out for most of a year.
Apple is still disputing the case, and wrestling with the DOJ post settlement.

And get this: The lead counsel for the DOJ was Hagens-Berman, a firm that has connections to Amazon going back to 2000, and currently shares a building (since early 2010) with Amazon down in the Denny area. Yeah, THERE's your conspiracy, buddy.

Without absolving (or even understanding) Amazon or the DOJ of their actions, your post is predicated on the notion that the only, or even the main, competitor for the Kindle is the Nook. I don't know the market for e-ink reading devices (though there are non-Kindle, non-Nook options), but Amazon is focusing its market on the Fire, which competes with iPads, Surfaces, and a myriad of Android tablets.

@10 There is a reasonable question about whether the e-reader market has ever been viable. Unfortunately they didn't really manage to create the market before the price of tablets started to undercut them and the draw of e-paper has never exactly been strong.

The case isn't about e-readers though, but e-book titles. Amazon largely fixed the price of e-books at $9.99. That turns out to be less than the suggested retail price of many titles, but more than many others. It has the effect of making new titles cheaper, but making library titles more expensive.

Rather than suing, Amazon could have just stuck to its pricing model, but savvy shoppers would have purchased new books from Amazon and library titles from Apple. That would have killed the profits which Amazon was making off older titles, which were funding the discounts on newer titles.

The case itself is bizarre. Nearly every printed book has a suggested retail price on it. This is understood to be something of a maximum price for the book. Some stores undercut it. Some specialty stores might even go above it. Big stores like B&N or Apple tend to follow it except for sales.

How long before publishers figure out that "selling an ebook" means putting it up on the Cloud and letting people download it to a reading app?

Aside from the comical misreading of the price-fixing case which previous comments have corrected, I would also point out that it was iPad that killed the Nook, not Amazon. The tablet market expanded way beyond e-readers and B&N never stood a chance in that environment.

Amazon won't be satisfied until it has killed all competition for any thing it sells, because the shareholder culture mentioned above means it never has to turn a profit as long as it keeps swallowing new producers. It pays no dividend, has no yield, and the P/E ratio is something like 623.8, but people continue to trade the stock. It's a completely artificial construct that has managed to sucker a large section of the investing public and an even larger section of the buying public. Bezos is basically trying to re-arrange the entire economy: forcing lower and lower prices on manufacturers, lower and lower wages on workers, lower and lower rates on shippers and carriers. When he finally achieves his goals, no one but the 1% will be able to buy the things he sells because he will have starved the middle class out of existence.

What? Barnes&Noble was some kind of benevolent company? They came on the scene and destroyed the neighborhood book store. What goes around comes around.

Fuck. Amazon. I mean really. Fuck. Amazon. And all the Amholes that don't realize what a scourge on society that they are

#16 the genie has done left that bottle quite a spell back. Wait till the glass domes are up!

#5 not a new concept, how do you think Toyota and Honda and (back then) Datsun and Sony etc got market share here in the good old USA. At Walmart (or Costco) they got the 75 buck microwave, sold at cost, and right next to it the fancy looking ones with the woo hoo features that they know most rubes will "move up" to, sold with a nice profit. It's selling shit, that's all.

Just be glad that the tit we feed from is amazon and not BN (Or other soon to be extinct relic of the 20th century.) May the milk flow freely for generations. And if you live in seattle you feed on it, like it or not, just like with MS. Amazon likely supports more independent businesses in seattle than it trundles over.

fuck BN, all it ever was is a crap mall bookstore with pretensions of building an online empire. And there will be a new breed of publisher once the Dino's in NYC are extinct. Maybe they will be based in Seattle as well.

I will not mourn B&N. They were a terrible company. The neighborhood used bookstore is still the best merchant from the consumers perspective.

maybe they should have a fucking victory parade. they're the home team now...