Mountain Directories East and West
Good morning fellow travelers. Just a little tidbit you may find helpful. We have the Mountain Directory West which was very useful on our trip West. We wanted to get the Mountain Directory East so ...
Forum Discussion
paulj wrote:
Just to be clear, the Amazon copies are not from Amazon itself, but from used book dealers. Those prices can vary all over the place, depending a lot on availability and demand. Clearly this is one where the supply is limited, and probably the turn over is also slow.
Quite right and I see that Amazon does not have either east or west listed as a current title. That means that the publisher stopped providing them to Amazon, if they ever did so. The publisher made the business decision to keep the books off Amazon in the belief that they could get more profit from selling the books in a more limited way.
This is a classic micro Economics problem. Can you make more money by selling more of an item at a lower price vs selling fewer at a higher price. Say Amazon takes 5 of the 15 price of the book to sell them but then sells 100,000 copies. And they manage shipping and handling in their ultra efficient system. The publisher decided to keep all 15 plus whats left of the 5 shipping price but probably sells maybe 10,000 copies. I'll leave the math to you.
This is what the kerfuffle with the big publishing houses was about. The publishers want to sell eBooks for the same prices as physical books. Amazon said that they were crazy and that they could make much more by selling the eBooks for under 10 but selling 4 or 5 times as many.
The publishers will join buggy whip and slide rule manufacturers before too much time passes.
