After a spat over e-book pricing with publishing giant Macmillan, Amazon.com has started again to sell books from the publisher of Andrew Young’s “The Politician,” Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” and other best-sellers.
Amazon was selling e-books for $9.99, a rate that publishers such as Macmillan complained was too low and putting pricing pressure on their physical books.
In an odd twist, on Saturday Amazon was offering the hardcover edition of ‘The Politician,” a book about the John Edwards presidential campaign, for $12, less than half the $24.95 list price.
And the pricing of the e-edition for the Kindle was just $8.55 — however it won’t be available until April 27. That prices is well below what Amazon had been charging for best-sellers and is substantially lower than the $12.99 to $14.99 Macmillan has been talking about. as a fair e-book price.
On Thursday, Macmillan CEO John Sargent had issued a memo saying a resolution to the week-long dispute between the companies was probably near. Macmillan’s authors include Janet Evanovich, Jonathan Franzen, Barbara Ehrenreich and its imprints include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martin’s Press and Henry Holt & Co.
Under Macmillan’s model, known as the “agency model,” e-books will be priced from $12.99 to $14.99 when first released, with prices changing over time. Macmillan and other publishers are widely believed to have agreed to a similar structure for Apple’s iPad device, coming in March and expected to strongly challenge Amazon’s dominance of the growing digital market.
Hachette Book Group USA, where authors include Stephenie Meyer and Malcolm Gladwell, announced Thursday its support for the agency model, which gives publishers more control over pricing.
The new revenue sharing system will likely reduce initial profits for publishers, but publishers, authors and agents believe that setting a higher price benefits the industry in the long-term.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this story.