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Amazon says deep discounts are just unfair

Here’s a twist: Amazon UK is angry at British publishers for – wait for it – applying deep online discounts to their books.

From The Times:

An online price war for books has broken out, pitching Amazon against some of Britain’s biggest publishers.

Amazon is angry that Penguin, Bloomsbury and others are discounting titles on their websites, encouraging customers to buy direct instead of using the online retailer.

As nice as it is to see an online book retailer getting a taste of its own medicine, the end result will probably not be good for books:

There are fears that Amazon may retaliate by regarding a publisher’s online price as the recommended retail price and applying its trading terms to that. If a publisher discounts a £20 book to £15 online and Amazon has a contract for a 50 per cent discount on the full price, Amazon would pay the company £7.50 instead of £10. Publishers say that this would be unfair and could ultimately drive up prices.

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