17:24 clock
“Neither readers nor writers benefit from having books are taken hostage,” they wrote in an open letter on the weekend. They criticized that Amazon had about the delivery of printed books slowed in the confrontation with the publisher Hachette and assumed no pre-orders. Amazon wants to impose lower prices for digital books.
Among the signatories of the written by bestselling author Douglas Preston protest letter, there are also names of other well-known writers such as David Baldacci, Lincoln Child and Suzanne Collins.
They called on the reader, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to say the opinion by e-mail. Amazon contrary to his own promise to think primarily of customers by the conflict will be played with Hachette on the back of the reader.
Amazon countered the move by the writers with their own open letter. It states, among other things, literature must be cheaper because they stand with many other media in the competition. “Books compete with mobile games, television, movies, facebook, blogs, news sites and more free.” The company also reiterated previous calculations, which with lower e-book prices like $ 9.99 more books are sold than about at $ 14.99, so that writers and publishers would earn even more in the end.
Amazon also defended the much-criticized massive pressure on Hachette. The publisher had brick for three months in the negotiations, and only grudgingly dealt with the Amazon-arguments, “as we took measures to reduce the sales of their titles in our store.” Amazon have proposed that, to compensate for the loss of the authors for the duration of the dispute – Hachette but I rejected this
Amazon had set early on digital books and first with prices at $ 9.99 Business in the United States. dominates. U.S. publishers took advantage of the launch of Apple’s e-book store on the iPad tablet to enforce a model patterned after the German book price fixing, in which they, rather than the dealer can determine the price. After the intervention of U.S. authorities this procedure has been tilted, and Amazon can now relate the books to the wholesale price again.
A similar price dispute over e-books there are in Germany. The Association of German Book Trade complained to the Federal Cartel Office on the dealer. Amazon rejected the allegation to delay the delivery of printed books from the publishing group Bonnier (Ullstein, Piper, Carlsen) in the course of negotiations.
dpa
No comments:
Post a Comment