BVS Reader's Blog

Archive for the ‘Amazon/iPad Pricing’ Category

If you’ve been following the posts about the iPad you already know about the skirmish between Amazon and Macmillan, one of the largest US publishers over ebook prices.

According to this post at ZD Net  Amazon capitulated over the weekend and will allow Macmillan to sell its ebooks for the price that Macmillan chooses, rather than forcing the company to sell its ebooks for the $9.99 (or less) that Amazon has traditionally charged for ebooks.

It looks likely that Amazon’s capitulation will allow other publishers to follow in Macmillan’s footsteps charging prices in the $12 – $15 range for ebooks.

It may be a good day for publishers who have had a win against Amazon’s monopolisitc power, but it’s probably not a good day for consumers who may find escalating prices for ebooks.

For the record, Black Velvet Seductions has no intention of changing our ebook prices which have always been below the minimum allowed by Amazon.

This morning I was greeted by an email with a link to a New York Times article which points to a continuing rift between many of the larger publishers and Amazon over the $9.99 price limit Amazon has for most ebooks.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post the big publishers think that $9.99 isn’t enough for their Kindle titles. They think that they should be allowed to set their prices at whatever price they choose. I agree in theory.

It should be up to publishers to set their own prices for the books they publish.  However, I would point out that Black Velvet Seductions and most other small publishers are not impacted at all by Amazon’s price cap on ebooks. We already price our ebooks well below the cap that Amazon imposes. It doesn’t cost as much to produce an ebook as it does to produce a paper book. In fact, once the file is created the copies of the file do not cost anything at all to produce. The price of the ebook covers things like the author’s labor in creating the story, the publisher’s cost in editing and proofreading the story, and the cost of the cover art, the cost of advertising and promoting the title. There is a cost in creating a quality book or ebook, but selling an ebook which has no production cost for the individual ebook itself for the same price as a hardback which costs a lot more to produce seems a bit…greedy. I still believe that publishers should have the right to set their own prices…and readers should have the right to decide whether those specific books are worth that specific price.

By the same token it seems to me that Amazon has the right to limit its offerings in whatever way it chooses. Other bookstores have been limiting what they offer based on what they can sell for the price the publisher is charging and they would be silly not to. Why should Amazon be held to a different standard?

Apple has elected to allow publishers the right to set their own prices withouth a top cap…which has excited a lot of larger publishers who would rather sell their ebook titles for something closer to $15 than the $9.99 that Amazon imposes.

All of the back and forth on pricing seems to have created a divide which larger publishers who are impacted will have to figure out how to navigate. Will they leave their books at Amazon for $9.99? Pull them from Amazon and price them for $15 at the iTunes/Apple bookstore?

Most contracts that we have signed covering sales of ebooks stipulate that we cannot have the regular price of books be less on another site than on the site we are contracting with. Since most of the sites that sell ebooks stipulate that you can’t sell ebooks for less than you sell them for on their site, Amazon holds quite a bit of power with the limits they impose on prices it charges for Kindle books. In effect, they are not setting the standard for pricing just at their site, they are setting the top price that can be charged on all of the sites that sell ebooks…at least if you want to continue to sell Amazon Kindle books through Amazon.

This is really why readers should be knowledgable and should care about the shake out between Amazon and Apple. What happens in that shake out is going to have a lot of impact on the pricing of ebooks — especially ebooks published by big publishers.

This seems like another shake out in the industry which is going to impact big publishers a lot more than it impacts the smaller ones, who already price their ebooks below the $9.99 imposed by Amazon.