It's a common theme. X used to be expensive to do. People used to pay Y to get X. Through technological advancements, X has become much cheaper or even practically free now. The entity closest to the source of X still charges Y for it and does not pass any of the savings to the entities and consumers below.
Your example is one. Printing, distributing, storing, displaying, and shipping physical books was expensive. Booksellers got ~50–60% of the book price for their trouble. Given the cost of doing business, it was a fair and reasonable price. All those costs are near zero now. Booksellers still want their 60%, because they can. They prefer to keep all the savings and pass none downstream.
The same is true for digital distribution, banking monthly and transaction fees, TI calculators, "convenience fee" for printing your own ticket with your own printer at home, ...
Until recently, brokerages charged exorbitant fees per trade. This is even though trades were effectively free for them and they were earning money in other ways. The status quo of charging for something that would naturally be free was preserved for decades, before a new kid came to the block and ruined the party for everyone. Now the consumers are much better off.
We as the consumers should demand and try to make more of this happen.
Ebook pricing never really made sense to me. During college when I was buying textbooks, the ebooks on Amazon were frequently significantly more expensive than a new copy of the physical book. Not sure if that's still the case though.
Robinhood has truly disrupted the brokerage market. But I'm curious about their viability now that a ton of mainstream brokerage have also dropped commissions.
They are probably not viable. But that has nothing to do with their lack of commission fees. As Matt Levine has described [0], zero is the natural price for transaction fee.It's not like TD Ameritrade and Schwab are losing money now to compete with Robinhood.
Many banking packages in Canada have a low number of debit transactions (like 4 or 12 or 20) per month for free and charge a fee ($1–$2) after that. It's not like debit card transactions are costing them anything (they actually get transaction fees from merchants). But they can get away with it, so they do it. It's just another revenue stream. The natural price for an additional debit transaction is also free. If they drop the fee, I would not be worried at all about their viability.
They're not the only player. Webull is similar. I suspect they have plenty of revenue opportunities outside charging for brokerage, but I don't know the details.
Your example is one. Printing, distributing, storing, displaying, and shipping physical books was expensive. Booksellers got ~50–60% of the book price for their trouble. Given the cost of doing business, it was a fair and reasonable price. All those costs are near zero now. Booksellers still want their 60%, because they can. They prefer to keep all the savings and pass none downstream.
The same is true for digital distribution, banking monthly and transaction fees, TI calculators, "convenience fee" for printing your own ticket with your own printer at home, ...
Until recently, brokerages charged exorbitant fees per trade. This is even though trades were effectively free for them and they were earning money in other ways. The status quo of charging for something that would naturally be free was preserved for decades, before a new kid came to the block and ruined the party for everyone. Now the consumers are much better off.
We as the consumers should demand and try to make more of this happen.