Third major publisher to move away from the $9.99 e-book on Amazon’s Kindle
It has not been a good week for Amazon’s Kindle e-reader as a third major publisher has said it wants to move away from the $9.99 e-book pricing model.
Last week, one of the six largest book publishers, Macmillan, fired the first shot across Amazon’s bow by meeting with the company and saying it no longer wanted its e-books sold for $9.99 on the popular Kindle e-reader. While Amazon fought the change at first, the company finally conceded to the demands, and that left the door for other publishers to come in and demand the same of the world’s largest e-retailer.
Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp, which in turn owns HarperCollins, said that he was unhappy with the $9.99 pricing during an earnings call. While there has been no confirmation that the publisher has begun talking with Amazon, it seems fairly likely that this will happen very soon.
Piling onto Amazon’s woes, Hachette went public yesterday with its intentions of moving to what is known as the agency model for pricing. Under this pricing model, the publisher sets the price for its books on a case-by-case basis, and the retailer that sells the book keeps 30 percent of the sale.
All of this sudden movement by publishers can be traced back to the announcement by Apple of the iBook application that would be part of its forthcoming iPad device. Steve Jobs made it clear during his announcement that publishers would be allowed to set their own prices, and that he believed that publishers were unhappy with Amazon setting the prices. With the marketing power of Apple, the publishers now had a huge backer in their corner, so it only made sense they would revisit Amazon over its pricing.
If the Kindle now doomed? Unlikely, but it will be interesting to see how many users are still thrilled with their devices once they have to pay more.
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