Add another potential announcement to the already long list of items we are expected to hear from Apple Wednesday: iBooks. Random House, one of the largest publishers of physical books, is now ready to accept Apple’s “agency” pricing model for ebooks sold through the Cupertino, Calif. company’s iBookstore.
The publisher, the lone holdout, said starting today, it will change its pricing to meet Apple’s requirement that booksellers get a 30 percent cut of the e-books’ retail price. The shift toward Apple’s position is hoped to increase e-book sales from iPad owners. The Apple tablet is competing with Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook, among other e-readers.
Random House told the Wall Street Journal today’s decision is a culmination of negotiations with Apple that began in December of 2010.
[All Things Digital, Wall Street Journal]
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.
15 responses to “Apple Finally Adds Random House to iBooks Publishers”
Why are people going to want to pay 30% more for an iBook that isn’t at all cross platform than on the hard copy of the book? Apple aren’t doing themselves any favours with their new commission.
Headline is misleading as it makes one believe that they have already added whereas this is not the case. You are just speculating what may or may not happen.
People buy a premium for macs in general. People are going to buy. Dont worry. Comparing several books currently in the iBookstore with Kindle prices shows that they are more or less the same.
Not sure what you mean regarding crossplatform. I have over 100 items in my iBooks library, epubs and pdfs, and I can read them without problems on my Windows 7 machine with Adobe Digital Editions or other epub/pdf compliant readers. Apple is using open standards in the published books, unlike Kindle items which can only be read with a Kindle Reader client.
Random House didn’t really have a choice here I don’t think. There wasn’t any reason for Apple to come down from their agency pricing and all it did was keep Random House from getting the most they can out of the growing e-book market. Should work out for both sides. eZanga Blog on Random House announcement – http://bit.ly/eOjtK6
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