If you make it more affordable
Wired covers Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s interview with Henry Blodget. On covering a spat with publisher Hachette (now finally resolved) over pricing, Bezos still maintains books are overpriced:
If we want a healthy culture of reading book-length things, we’ve got to make books more accessible and part of that is making them less expensive. If you make it more affordable, it’s not going to make authors less money. It’s going to make authors more money.
The fallacy here is that an author will magically sell enough extra copies of a title at a lower rate to make up for dropping the price, because way more people prefer to pay less for whatever they buy. In reality, though, we’ve now seen a race to the bottom in apps, games and books, and although there are naturally a few winners (as ever), it’s hard to see a climate where the bulk of creative people are better off because of prices continuing to tumble. If anything, we’re furthering the decline of value in media—it’s becoming entirely throwaway, and people are trained to expect low prices (and, increasingly, no prices).
Really, Bezos should have just been more honest and said:
If we want a healthy culture of Amazon making more money, we’ve got to make everything more accessible and part of that is making everything less expensive. If you make everything more affordable, it’s not going to make Amazon less money. It’s going to make Amazon more money.