I Have mixed feelings about this. On the isue of pre-order, I can't see it would make a difference. A reader will get the book when it's available if they wanted it enough to pre-order. On the one hand Amazon is pushing its own agenda, but on the other, I'm never going to pay exhorbitant prices for ebooks. Never. The big 5 have been gouging and I'm not playing.

If the pre-order option isn't available then it deprives authors from being able to get on bestseller lists. This applies to big lists like NYT, but then it also takes them out of the running for a smaller, regional list like the Denver Post;s book list. It is a realistic possibility for an author to get on a regional list, and it is immensely helpful to the book's sales. No pre-order is particularly bad for debut authors who need to put up decent numbers out of the gate. A marketing team can only devote itself to a handful of titles for the first couple months of release before they have to move on to the next set of books, and if your first book didn't impress, then it isn't likely you'll get as much effort put into your next one. Basically, pre-orders are a big part of the game for everyone except the consumer. And as for pricing, it is just incomprehensible for me to consider charging roughly $10-$18 for a book as "gouging" when that is collectively covering the cost/labor of an author, an agent, an editor, a publisher, a printer, a team of marketeers, and then potentially from there: a distribution channel, a bookstore's profit/operating costs, and a bookseller's wages. Amazon prices are cheap because they simply lose money on books. It isn't profitable for them at all, but since they are the "everything" store, they have other products with bringing in enough revenue to support unrealistic book prices. I guess we can all just let people self-publish to keep it cheap, but I'm not too excited to swim through the oceans of rubbish that self-publishing creates while looking for a decent book to read.

Thanks for explaining that. It sounds like a false economy, but I can see that authors would want to get on these lists before the book is even released. I totally dismiss tags like 'best seller', but I suppose other readers care what a load of strangers are reading.