Print
Amazon let it be known a few months ago that they planned to rollout an improved royalty model for Kindle sales. Well, now that new option is available to publishers and authors. The new system has authors and publishers receiving 70% of the revenue from a sale. But Amazon isn't giving away money for no reason. Nope, they want something in return.
Amazon stipulates that to qualify for the program, a book must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99, and that that price must be at least 20% lower than the list price for the dead tree edition. The price must also be at or below the cost of the same work on other platforms. Outside of the pricing, publishers will have to make the book available for purchase in all geographical regions the publisher has rights to do so. Lastly, the book cannot have features, like text to speech, disabled.
We hope that publishers are willing to go along with this program. Amazon is looking to encourage them to keep ebook prices reasonable, and make an overall more appealing product. No one wants to spend more on a digital book than they would on a physical version. Do you think publishers will follow Amazon's lead?
Comments are closed on this article
jeffhex
June 30, 2010 at 4:49pm
Can I resell them? Can I give them to friends? Can I loan them to my clients and relatives?
I'm not sure I'm willing to give up those features if DRM is involved.
Oh, and don't forget, Amazon can "unsell" a book as well. They've done it in the past. You buy it, but you don't really own it. You're just licensing it.
someuid
June 30, 2010 at 4:16pm
I usually don't shop at Amazon because I think Bezos is the devil (my opinion). And I was really irked when several publishers forced Amazon and BN to sell digital copies of books for the same price as dead tree books because they "didn't want the lower price to tarnsih their brands and new books." What a load of crap they were feeding us while taking money out of my pocket. Hence, I held off on buying an ebook reader.
But this is really cool. Bezos stuck it to the publishers by going straight to the authors and gave them a better deal. I hope the authors call their publishers and tell them to stick their cartel-like pricing schemes where the sun doesn't shine.
Of course, that still doesn't make me want to become an Amazon zombie. I'll still go to bn.com for my reading pleasures. If this new pricing methods helps pull down the price of ebooks, hello nook.
water_man3
June 30, 2010 at 2:45pm
If publishers catch on with this win-win offer, I'd like to see movie and music studios agree to a similar deal.
Ashton2091
June 30, 2010 at 2:57pm
i agree with you completely. the music and movie industries should take notes.
Ashton2091
June 30, 2010 at 2:20pm
Not sure if they will follow, but they def should. as a businessman this is a great business model. we all know that amazon is a behemoth in online marketing and sales...with this model, it would be silly to not follow. it will benefit the publishers in the end.
