Hachette Becomes Third Publisher to Join Apple Ebook Pricing

Add Hachette Book Group to the growing list of publishers using Apple’s iPad to drive a wedge between Amazon and its requirement for $9.99 pricing on ebooks. The company joins Macmillan and HarperCollins adopting Apple’s “agency model” pricing and making waves in an area Amazon once dominated.

“There are many advantages to the agency model, for our authors, retailers, consumers, and publishers,” Hachette USA CEO David Young said Thursday night. “Without this investment in our authors, the diversity of books available to consumers will contract, as will the diversity of retailers, and our literary culture will suffer,” he added. The remark about a lack of diversity in ebook retailers was an obvious dig at Amazon, which until the iPad, enjoyed the lion’s share of control over pricing.

Macmillan, which earlier struck a blow against Amazon by insisting its ebooks be priced between $12.99 and $14.99, Thursday advertised one of its books in the New York Times with the pointed proviso: “at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.”

This weekend, Amazon after briefly pulling Macmillan’s titles, announced it had ‘capitulated’ to the publisher’s demand, however spinning the reversal as an advantage for independent presses.

HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., has used the threat of Apple’s iPad to force Amazon to the negotiating table. Murdoch told analysts earlier this week the Seattle-based online bookseller was “ready to sit down.” Although no details were provided about HarperCollins‘ arrangement with Apple, Murdoch said Apple’s pricing “will not be fixed in a way that Amazon has been doing it.”

Some see it as only a question of when the other two publishers mentioned by Apple when the iPad was unveiled – Simon & Schuster and Penguin reach similar deals with Apple. The push toward Apple is seen as book publishers hoping to prevent a repeat of how $20 retail CD music sales were quickly cannibalized by online $1 sales of digital tunes.

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[Via AllThingsDigital, 9to5Mac, AppleInsider and GalleyCat]

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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://publishingstories.blogspot.com/ Mihai Paunescu
You are right with this but I doubt that the iPad is the shooting gun.
The ideea of multimedia enriched books is not new. The last initiative you can see in the Vook concept.
We might have to rethink the book principle even more than this. Simply adding video or sound does not make that book revolutionary.
My take is that we will have to accept new ways of presenting the textual information. May be something like avoiding long phrases and and presenting them one at a time like a mix between tweeter and the old cartoons magazines.
Some things are better expressed in words and other in pictures. Imagine what a task will be to write the next adventure hit. the author should have well polished movie production skills.
I’m not that sure that even the iPad is prepared to support this. Is more of a software evolution than a hardware device.