Saturday 25 May 2013

Macmillan and Amazon in spat over e-book pricing

Pulls virtual books off virtual shelves

31 Jan 2010 16:15 | by a staff writer | Filed in Business Amazon E-book reader

2 Comments

Amazon has taken all e-books published by Macmillan off its Kindle e-reader site because of an argument the two companies are having over pricing.

A lass using a Kindle, from Kindle web site According to reports, Macmillan issued a statement yesterday saying that its CEO, John Sargent, had visited Amazon HQ to try and broker new terms and conditions and on his return from that meeting was told that its e-books would only be listed as available through third parties.

Sources indicated that Macmillan had wanted to price its e-book editions at $15 rather than the $9.99 price Amazon wanted to sell them for.

Last week Macmillan became one of the publishing partners for the Apple iPad. Apple has plans to allow publishers to set their own prices for books, and that price is likely to be around $15.

Amazon wants to keep the prices of e-books for the Kindle at $9.99 - and it's likely this Macmillan-Amazon spat may well spread to other publishers too.

Comments (rss feed)

RogerTheGeek - 31 Jan 17:01

It is pretty obvious that the publisher has no clue that e-books are not the same product as the hardback book. The idea is to cut the price of obtaining the content since you don't have the overhead of the old style publishing.

Are they not looking at how electronic news has changed the newspaper industry? Do they not look at how people buy music today?

Get a clue and change your industry.
Mr Lizard - 31 Jan 21:29

Hmm... so if all the publishers also sign with the fruity new iBooks store (who sell at $15), and ask Amazon to hike the price up, will Amazon tell them all to take a hike?

I admire Amazon for sticking to their guns, but surely they can't pull the same trick on all the publishers - they'll have no books left to sell.