Publishers Who Play Ball with Amazon’s Kindle Will Get 70% Royalty Rate

Posted 01/20/2010 at 12:55pm | by Bart Salisbury

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Amazon’s Kindle is a neat idea, as are eReaders in general. But they aren’t much good if there’s nothing to 'eRead' on them. Book publishers, still stuck in last century’s economic models, are slow to come around to Jeff Bezo’s world of bits-and-bytes, leaving a gap in what is and what might be. Amazon has moved to shore-up that gap, at least for the Kindle and Amazon’s digital bookstore: it’s offering to pay authors and publishers a new royalty of 70 percent of list price--doubling the current 35 percent rate.

Well, not quite 70 percent. First, Amazon wants to deduct delivery costs. This is readily factored into the equation, as Amazon projects costs to be 15-cents per megabyte. And the book must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99 to qualify for this royalty rate. On top of this the book’s ‘ePrice’ must be at least 20 percent less than its physical copy price.

Oh, and Amazon wants distribution rights throughout the world where the publisher/author has such rights. The book can’t have been published prior to 1923. And the book must be sold in the United States.

Honestly, though, isn’t the soul of an author or publisher worth a royalty of 70 percent?

Image Credit: Amazon