So Much Wit

Cory “Red Cape and Gog­gles” Doc­torow has a good piece in Pub­lish­ers Weekly about price dis­crim­i­na­tion and price elas­tic­ity of demand in the pub­lish­ing indus­try, par­tic­u­larly as regards the recent Amazon/​Macmillan kerfuffle:

Mean­while, the mys­ter­ies of price and profit are on everyone’s minds these days thanks to the Macmillan-​​Amazon spat, with com­men­ta­tors on both sides of the debate draw­ing par­al­lels to the train wreck of a decade the record­ing indus­try just went through. Those root­ing for Macmil­lan point to the way lis­ten­ers allegedly aban­doned their will­ing­ness to pay for music — even as a sin­gle retailer, Apple, gained near-​​total con­trol over pric­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion. Those who take Amazon’s side point to the record­ing industry’s unwill­ing­ness to part­ner with inno­v­a­tive tech­nol­ogy firms like Nap­ster, which offered the RIAA a blank check in exchange for a license to con­tinue oper­at­ing. They also point to Apple’s sim­pli­fied, 99 cent/​track pric­ing as the break­through that lis­ten­ers needed to start paying.

I think they’re both right. On one hand, Macmil­lan should be wor­ried about los­ing con­trol of its des­tiny, as Ama­zon, a sin­gle dis­trib­u­tor, seeks to lock read­ers into its devices and ser­vices. But on the other hand, Amazon’s opti­mistic (or, some would say, cut­throat) pric­ing on the cream of the pub­lish­ing industry’s prof­its — frontlist hard­cov­ers — isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a loser for pub­lish­ers, and it’s pos­si­ble that the world’s largest online book­store just might have some insight into pur­chas­ing pat­terns that pub­lish­ers need to hear.

(Via Jef­frey Zeld­man.)