The Archives
-
02.21.10Publishers should add value before raising ebook pricesWhen it comes to ebook pricing, I've changed my position on the matter almost weekly; sometimes I side with publishers, sometimes with retailers, sometimes with consumers. But I think this week I may have finally realized something that forces me into a more permanent point of view on the matter. It's this: Most publishers want to maintain the traditional business model and slow the growth of the ebook market. Most publishers, in fact, are trying to intentionally slow the uptake of ebooks by consumers. I think that's what the whole pricing issue is really about--driving away customers as much as possible, ...
-
02.05.10The good and bad news from the pricing war between Amazon and publishersFor readers, there is one easy win to come from the current fight between Amazon and publishers over how to price and sell ebooks, and it is that at least one of the publishers demanding a change in terms has said that it will stop delaying ebook releases if it can practice variable pricing. Young said the company would release e-books simultaneously under the new model--Hachette USA had been one of a number of US publishers to window new releases because of the price they were being offered for sale on Amazon.com's Kindle device. The second bit of good news, although this ...
-
01.31.10Is $14.99 too high for a new release?There was some drama over the past few days between Amazon and Macmillan Publishers (see photo illustration above), perhaps spurred on by the whole Apple iPad announcement, concerning the pricing of Macmillan ebooks on the Amazon Kindle store. It all came to a close on Sunday evening, when Amazon announced that from now on it will let Macmillan set the price of new releases and bestsellers in the $13-15 range. Amazon posted a strongly worded announcement on its own forums to let customers know what went down, and to make it clear that it disagrees: Continue Reading...
-
05.16.09How to find cheap summer reading for your KindleIf you've ever tried looking for cheap, high quality books on the Amazon Kindle store, you've probably run into the same frustrating limitations that I have--namely, that you can't set a specific price floor or upper limit when you perform a search. There are so many titles on the Kindle Store that it's not practical to manually browse, screen by screen, through the listings. To make matters worse, you can't filter out self-published, amateur, and public domain (aka "can be found for free elsewhere") titles that junk up the listings. Well, guess what? You can sort by specific price ranges ...
-
12.02.08It begins: publishers starting to hike prices on Amazon ebooksKindle owners, prepare yourselves. As ebooks grow in market share, you're going to be hearing a lot of arguments from publishers--all of them deeply suspect--about why they have to price their books higher. If you were around for the whole mp3 revolution--from its tiny birth pangs in '98 and '99, through the iPod's first really disruptive years in '03 and '04, to the fairly mature market we have now--you'll have heard all of these arguments before. If you're not a technophile and don't even think of your beloved Kindle as a disruptive technology, the arguments might be new to you. But ...
Kindlerama and all original content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
© Copyright 2008-2010. All rights reserved. Contact me.