“What’s so hard to understand about Random House‘s strategy” concerning Amazon and the iPad, asks Mike Shatzkin in a commentary on his Idealog blog. As many have observed (including MobyLives, such as here), Random is the only one of the Big Six who have opted out of adopting the agency pricing model for ebooks and forcing Amazon to accept that, and they’re the only one of the Big Six not to close a deal with Apple for selling its wares on the iPad.

Now, Shatzkin notes, a lot of people, “including some who are really well-informed about publishing, wonder ‘why?’ I wonder why they wonder.”

Says Shatzkin,

In the short run, which from this seat looks like some months, if not a year, Kindle and Amazon are still likely to be the leader in ebook sales, and other established ereader platforms that are optimized for text (Nook, Sony Reader, the new ereader from Kobo) will remain important. By holding themselves out of the new channels, continuing the current policies of “wholesale” discounting, and allowing the retailers to set prices, Random House will be maximizing their short-term sales and profits. Assuming they maintain their publisher-established  prices near their current levels (and why would they not?), Random House will collect more money for each ebook sold than their competitors do while the public will will pay less for each Random House ebook they buy than for comparable titles from other publishers.

That, as Shatzkin continues, “is a pretty significant short term advantage. Why wonder why somebody would do that?”

But there may be another reason — if Amazon, as it is wont to do, should decide to …

… retaliate against a publisher’s print business over dislike of their ebook policies, wouldn’t they also be likely to favor the books of a big publisher that cooperates with them when everybody else doesn’t? Couldn’t that add a further incremental edge to Random House in the short run while the iPad book-reading audience is still ramping up?