By Stephen Windwalker
- Originally posted January 31, 2010 at Kindle Nation Daily – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010
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As customers and members of Kindle Nation, we can’t pick Amazon’s battles. Amazon’s Kindle Team has posted this message on the Kindle community forums within the past hour, strongly suggesting that the company does not expect to have a strategy for fighting back if publishers insist on pricing ebooks at $12.99 to $14.99. We’ll see, and I hope you will share your opinion with Amazon directly on the forums and also in comment form below:
Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.
We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.
Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!
Thank you for being a customer.
I wonder if capitulate is the right word — maybe they should have done so from the get-go and let the pub take the heat for inflated prices, b/c I am fairly certain people will not pay that for ebooks. I know I won't.
Interesting times…
Sam
Sam I agree totally about the inflated prices for ebooks.I also bought my kindle for the inexpensive books and was very pleasantly surprised to find the abundance of free books.I guess nothing stays the same.
I agree with Sam… peruse the comments on Kindle edition of hardcovers that are priced over $9.99, and you'll see many examples of people saying they flat out won't pay more than that.
Macmillan will eventually have to fold. People simply won't pay the prices Macmillan thinks it can get.
In other words, the free market is still working, and should take care of this, given time.
As a Kindle reader from abroad, I already have to pay an extra 2 dollars on top of every e-book I buy so I consider this price raise completely unacceptable.
On a side note, why do we have to pay this extra "tax" that is not enforced on paper books? Any idea if this is going to be a permanent fixture? Because, if the price of e-books continues to go up, I might as well go back to print books…
This is frustrating. The whole point of getting a Kindle was the price of the books. I don't understand how a paperback can be $7 while a Kindle book can be $10 (+ the $2 rip-off tax for being an overseas customer!). Surely the costs in producing an ebook HAVE to be less than that of dead tree?
Your story above on the Audible offer is instructive, & quite pertinent to this post as well. Just as Apple has failed to impact Audible with their considerably higher priced audio books; it is unlikely that these tactics will result in any appreciable loss of Kindle business for Amazon either. I own an ipod, & I buy my audio books from Audible. When itunes was selling music at 99 cents a song, I bought hundreds of songs a year. Now that they have raised the prices to $1.29, I buy a few dozen. I am not impressed with the ability to pay 30% extra for music with looser DRM restrictions. I wasn't planing on stealing them in the first place & I don't appreciate subsidizing the behavior of others. Even if all of the major publishers raise their kindle edition prices, there will be plenty of good reading available for much less, just as their is plenty of good music at emusic.com for much less than the itunes store. We will be encouraged to explore less expensive, less mainstream choices, & doubtless find a great deal of excellent material that we might otherwise have missed. Frankly, after having my Kindle for barely over a month, I have enough excellent quality free & inexpensive material to keep me reading for months at 3 books a week, so price will surely be a factor in my decisions on what to read if the future. This might be a boon for authors who would like to deal directly with Amazon. Just as with the music industry, the publisher's are almost certainly "shooting themselves in the foot."