Amazon Dumps Phones For Price Of A Book

Only Amazon can take out full-page NYT ads to promote a 99-cent phone that just sold for $199 a few weeks ago that gives a customer free prime (99- buck value), a ten-dollar spending credit, and free shipping for a year. It is easy to compete when you have a model that loses money to capture market share. However, their usual tactics aren't working and they are falling under pressure from several vendors and industries, most notably publishing, the one area Amazon originally built itself on. It is taking on too many things as loss-leaders to the point they now just lead in losses. Consumers are happy because everything is cheap but they are in for a shock when Amazon bleeds more money. Competitors are not happy to lose out to a company that doesn’t play by sound economic principles and fairness. The only thing that will stop Amazon is Wall Street. When the stock tanks, you will see a different approach by Amazon. Right now they want to sell books and phones for 99-cents. Are they the new dollar store or a real company? Time will tell.

Life By The Numbers

If you’re like me, you appreciate statistics about who we are, how we live, what we think, and how things are.  Of course, no statistic is fully accurate. They give us a snapshot into our lives.  Here’s a bunch that may mean something to you:

880 billion photos were taken this past year -- worldwide.  This means if every man, woman and child had access to a camera and had the desire/ability to take photos, each person on the planet would have taken about 125 photos.  But if you factor in that several billion likely don’t own a camera, and the fact that many under-10’s or over 90’s likely take few if any photos, the number of photos per active photographer shoots up.  Does any of this mean anything?

How about this?  Time magazine, which informed me of the photo stat, says the avg. American uses over 7,000 feet of toilet paper per year – or roughly 18 feet per day.  I guess when you factor in America is overweight by huge numbers, it has to come out of the other end at a consistent pace.

Looking for life beyond Earth?  Scientists know there are at least 100 billion star systems in The Milky Way, just one of many galaxies in the Universe.  Only a few thousand such star systems have been examined for life.  But by 2040 it is estimated 10,000,000 star systems will have been evaluated.

According to Mental Floss magazine, 1.3 million people send emails every minute, 21,000 eat pizza each minute, and two cars are stolen every minute in the US.  Right now, at this very moment, 2 billion people are sleeping and 1.6 million are on Facebook.

The US spends more money than the money than the value of what it is printing.  Say what?   A quarter costs 11 cents to make and a dime 4.6 cents, but a nickel costs 9.4 cents and a penny costs 1.8 cents.  Even when printing money, the government finds a way to lose. 

A theater gets 45% of every movie ticket dollar and the movie studio gets 55%.  Actors get about 15% of the studio’s take, ads and promotion cost triple what the actors get, and production and distribution eat up almost half what the studio takes in.

However, for books, according to Mental Floss, the breakdown is different.  Retailers get 45% of a book sale.  Authors get 15%, Printing costs 10%, Marketing 7%, Wholesaler 10% and Publisher 13%.

Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2014