Legal Commentary

Amazon (And Consumers) Lose E-Book Pricing War

By Jeralyn

To me, the attraction of the Kindle has been the pricing of books. Instead of paying $30 for a new hardcover, you can pay $9.99.

That price is now going to jump to $15.00 as the result of the top three publishers winning a price war with Amazon and Apple being on the publisher's side.

The e-book agreements, with CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster and News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers, mirror deals struck this year with Apple for the iPad: Some new best sellers will be priced at $9.99 but most will be priced at $12.99 to $14.99.

[More...]

The new deals ensure that Amazon will have the same array of titles that rival what Apple will offer on its digital bookstore. Apple has forged deals with five of the six major publishers to provide titles on the iPad, which will compete with Amazon's popular Kindle e-reader.

$15.00 for a book you can't thumb through or hold before buying and don't have a hard copy of after you've read it? I think the publishers just shot themselves in the foot. Their greed will come back to haunt them as people will buy way fewer books. I know I will. For $10, I'll take a chance and buy something I don't know much about. For $15, I'm going to ask myself if I really need or want it and decide to think about it. 9 times out of 10, I'll either forget to go back to it or decide I can do without it.

There's a huge market here for publishers. Instead of tapping into it, they are limiting it by over-pricing. Big mistake.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 01, 2010 (boomark / email).