“Here’s another publisher publicly throwing its weight behind Apple–and against Amazon–in the e-book pricing war,” Peter Kafka reports for AllThingsD. “Hachette Book Group says it will pursue the ‘agency model’ for pricing e-books: It sets the retail prices and the retailer gets a 30 percent cut.”
“Translated into more practical terms, this means Hachette will demand that Amazon and other retailers–but really, this is aimed at Amazon–raise the prices on their e-books from the $9.99 standard they’ve adopted. Instead, the publisher will want them to use the $12.99-$14.99 standard for new books, which Apple introduced last week along with its iPad,” Kafka reports.
“Hachette is one of five publishers that participated in Apple’s iPad launch event last week. Macmillan, one of the other five, has spent the past week engaged in a public battle with Amazon over the pricing model. On Sunday, Amazon said it would capitulate to Macmillan’s demands,” Kafka reports. “Meanwhile, look for the other three publishers that have allied with Apple–Pearson’s Penguin Group, News Corp.’s (NWS) HarperCollins and CBS’s (CBS) Simon & Schuster–to fall in line. On Tuesday, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said he expected to renegotiate his publisher’s deal with Amazon soon.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Author Charles Stross blogs, “Just before Apple announced the iPad and the agency deal for ebooks, Amazon pre-empted by announcing an option for publishing ebooks in which they would graciously reduce their cut from 70% to 30%, ‘same as Apple.’ From a distance this looks competitive, but the devil is in the small print; to get the 30% rate, you have to agree that Amazon is a publisher, license your rights to Amazon to publish through the Kindle platform, guarantee that you will not allow other ebook editions to sell for less than the Kindle price, and let Amazon set that price, with a ceiling of $9.99. In other words, Amazon choose how much to pay you, while using your books to undercut any possible rivals (including the paper editions you still sell). It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the major publishers don’t think very highly of this offer.”
Full article here.
Not always. More often, competition creates market equalization.
Remember, this is still one small step. At some point, an aspiring author will realize he can set up a e-publishing outfit which lets authors go directly to Apple and skip the old guard publishers just like CD-Baby.
Remember, Apple didn’t so much force the music publishers to lower prices, as much as it forced them to give up the artificial LP/CD-format where they bundled 12 songs together.
Apple is basically letting the publishers set their prices just like it lets developers set their prices in the App store. I have a feeling publishers will get into a lot of specials deals just like the app developers, one the iBook store takes off.
“People have been focussing upon the higher potential price, but the real thing that people are opposed to is that Amazon has been ripping off authors and publishers by also trying to take a publishers’ cut.”
I have no problem with redoing how the pie is cut.
What I do think is that the attached price hikes have potential for negatively affect the growth of ebooks. Stop focusing on price per unit and think about opening up a new revenue stream. It’s going to happen – might as well make sure it happens via legal avenues rather than the P2P route that prices over a certain point will cause. I’m not saying the book publishers are over that line, or that I even know what the line is. But my understanding from my friends that might use this is that they are right around the “too expensive” line. The market is obviously going to grow – the question is just how fast the legal avenue grows relative to piracy.
Also, is there an ebook equivalent of a library? Can you rent a book? My wife goes through 2-5 books a week – she couldn’t afford ebooks at even $6.99 each.
@NavyTim, You’re gonna need a bigger iPad!
Muhahahahahahahahahahahhahahaaaaa!
Music was being downloaded for $0.00 dollars when Apple entered this market. So please, stop with the erroneous analogy.
Those that think that e-books cost nothing to prepare and distribute, please get a clue. How many books have any of you written? How many have you all published? Edited? Proofread? Researched?