Amazon ‘Capitulates’ Over Macmillan Ebook Pricing

Amazon has raised the white flag in the first skirmish over ebook pricing. The victors in this first round could be publisher Macmillan and rival ebook-reader maker Apple. After temporarily stopping selling Macmillan titles over a pricing dispute, the online book-seller said it was capitulating to the publisher’s demands.

“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 announced on its Kindle Community forums.

The Seattle-based Amazon said Macmillan “clearly communicated” that they wanted to charge between $12.99 and $14.99 for e-books of bestsellers and hardcover editions. Monday morning, Amazon’s website displayed the message “Tell the publisher I’d like to read this book on the Kindle” when searching for Macmillan’s best-selling tell-all “The Politician.”

Amazon, which wants to sell ebooks for $9.99, couched its reversal on pricing as a victory for smaller publishers. The Internet company said “many independent presses and self-published authors will see this an an opportunity to provide attractively priced ebooks as an alternative.”

One day after Apple unveiled the iPad, Macmillan CEO John Sargent travelled to Seattle to talk “new terms of sa;es for ebooks” with Amazon, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. A day after the talks, Amazon pulled direct sales of the publisher’s books.

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[Via WSJ and AppleInsider]

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Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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http://www.technovia.co.uk Ian Betteridge
The point you didn’t make: The $9.99 price is *under* what Macmillan charges Amazon per-title. In other words, Amazon is selling ebooks at a loss in order to cement its position in the market as the leading ebook supplier.
gadgetgeek
Apple only barely announced the iPad… and already there is trouble in Amazonia.
I guess it is true, Apple’s iPad will shake things up in the book/media industry. At first it will turn everything upside down, and certainly destroy Amazon’s monopolistic and greedy stranglehold on publishers. Eventually, the market will correct itself. Eventually, the CUSTOMERS will decide what price they are willing to buy ebooks relative to the price they are willing to buy paperback books. It might take a couple years until we see that.