"Have publishers already lost the war over agency pricing?"

Are publishers who raised e-book pricing the past year losing the ebook-pricing war?   I'd like to think so.

 The blog article's subject title is from the headline on the article by Philip Jones at Futurebook.net commenting on the higher-priced e-books not appearing very much in Amazon's topmost besteller lists (UK).

  Actually, he's commenting on The Guardian's article by Sam Jordison on "EU anger over ebook deal suggests hard times ahead for publishers."

  Describing again (1) the circumstances leading to the use of Apple's "Agency Plan" by the Big5 (and now Big6) publishers, which raised e-book prices by 30-50% average, this last year, and (2) the raids by the European Commission on publishing houses in the UK to investigate possible anti-trust violations, seizing not only paperwork but also "smart phones and laptops from senior executives," the Guardian's Jordison sides with the publishers against what he describes as a monopolist Amazon against angelic publishers who are just trying "to get a good deal for everyone."

  They do, however, have the sense to see a valid point in the complaint "The only reality we readers know is that we want to buy the book but can't."

  They continue, nevertheless, "But the fact that customers have a distorted view of how much ebooks should cost is hardly the publishers' fault.  Especially since a new breed of "self-published" authors are starting to sell millions of the things at $0.99 or less on Amazon – which casts an interesting light on the recent declarations about ebooks outselling paper books."

  Imagine that!  But then, new technology has been a problem through the ages for those wedded to older technology and unwilling to adjust to it.

Futurebook's article
Philip Jones thinks that Sam Jordison is an advocate of publishers setting of bookseller prices "but he is concerned that publishers may lose the battle legally, and that they have already lost the battle in the hearts of the consumers."  

Yes, and Jordison might do a bit more wondering about why that is so, and it's not just about pricing.  It also says a lot about what publishers think of their reading customers.  I've seen publisher statements (and reprinted them) that anyone well-off enough to buy an e-reader can afford the high book prices.  (Thanks to Joe Besser for the correction.)

 In marking books up by almost 50% when new, and also OVER the price of their paper back copies too often, they display a real disdain for e-book customers who are expected to spend almost as much OR MORE on a product that cannot be resold, and in most cases still cannot be lent to anyone.

  This goes against the traditional attitude toward books.  The publishers prohibit, for the most part, lending as is normal with paper books, and prohibit entirely re-selling the books.  Yet they price them higher than paperback books, and often only a few dollars less than a hardcover.  And now they're targeting libraries, with e-books to be disabled after x number of loans.  And the latter is with publishers willing to lend e-books at all to public libraries.  Macmillian and Simon & Schuster won't.  Jones points out:

'... publishers such as Hachette, Harper, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, should be getting their titles into the Kindle charts, even at higher prices.  But I just checked the hourly Kindle chart, and there are no agency priced books in the top 20.  The highest placed title is David Nicholls' One Day (Hodder/Hachette), which also happens to be the fourth most expensive Kindle Edition in the current top 50.

Furthermore, and this is even more worrying.  The average price of paid-for books in Amazon's Kindle top 50 chart today is £1.79.  It is little wonder Guardian commentators [people commenting on the article] think e-books should cost less than agency publishers are making them available: they do.

Read some of the reviews appended to those self-published titles in the Kindle chart, and we could be forgiven for thinking that price has superceded quality in the minds of Kindle users.  This is not just worrying it is tragic.  Agency publishers have a limited period of time to prove Amazon wrong by getting their titles up the Kindle bestseller chart, before the OFT rules one way or another. The concern must be that by then, the war may already have been lost. '

His numbers are from the Amazon UK Kindle store, but in the U.S. the UK site's Kindle book pricing is not displayed except in the Bestseller listings.

Actually, there ARE e-reader customers who give cost a very high weight in the economy we're in today.  Many are also finding quality writing although they may have to dig deep and wide, but when they find it, word of mouth is a huge factor in online book sales.

  The online community is important for those not wanting to wade through it all, and there is actually a way to find quality writing without depending on large publishing houses and publicity machines, to the extent that some writers discovered by price-conscious readers have been offered contracts by large publishing houses; an important trend now is seen in authors who are hesitating to go with the contracts offered, as it may be more beneficial for them to continue to 'self-publish' because the large publishers have not had a reputation for paying the authors/creators what they are due.

  For the Amazon UK customers' rather raw feelings on all this (and publishers should really pay more attention to what is said), see the Agency pricing thread on their Kindle forums.  It's similar to what is seen on the U.S. forums but UK customers are even more angry about it because the increases by the Big5 publishers have been quite outrageous in the UK where general e-book pricing had been lower than it had been Amazon US's Kindlestore.

BESTSELLER E-BOOK listings for UK and US stores
  Here is the current Bestseller listing (paid and free) for Amazon UK,
  and here's the current Bestseller listing for for Amazon US.



Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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Amazon UK tells Kindle customers about "Agency" plan's higher pricing

Teleread's Paul Biba had an alert for us this morning about an Amazon UK announcement which, it turns out, was made to customers on their Kindle forums.  You can read his linked post, "Amazon UK tells customers about agency pricing and resulting higher prices" to see how he learned about it.

 Since it is Amazon's statement about its conflicts with Big5 publishers over e-book pricing in the U.S. and what Amazon is doing to resist the Agency plan in the UK, readers of this blog might find the forum post interesting.

Here is the Amazon UK forum announcement:

' Initial post: 14 Oct 2010 17:29 BST
Last edited by the author 22 hours ago
Amazon.co.uk Kindle Team says:
(AMAZON OFFICIAL)
Dear Customers,

Recently, you may have heard that a small group of UK publishers will require booksellers to adopt an "agency model" for selling e-books. Under this model, publishers set the consumer price for each e-book and require any bookseller to sell at that price. This is unlike the traditional wholesale model that's been in place for decades, where booksellers set consumer prices.

It is indeed correct that this group of publishers will require Amazon and other UK booksellers to accept an agency model for e-books. We believe they will raise prices on e-books for consumers almost across the board. For a number of reasons, we think this is a damaging approach for readers, authors, booksellers and publishers alike.

In the US, a few large publishers have already forced such a model on all US booksellers and readers. You can read the thread we posted about that change here:
http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum?cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx2MEGQWTNGIMHV&displayType=tagsDetail.

As we're now faced with a similar situation in the UK, we wanted to share our thinking and some details about what we have observed from our experience in the US.

First, as we feared, the US agency publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) raised digital book prices almost across the board. These price increases were not only on new books, but on older, "backlist" books as well (in the industry, "backlist" books are often defined as books that have been published more than a year ago). Based on our experience as a bookseller setting consumer prices for many years, we know that these increases have not only frustrated readers, but have caused booksellers, publishers and authors alike to lose sales.

There is some good news to report. Publishing is not a monolithic industry - there are many publishers of all sizes taking a wide range of approaches to e-books. And most publishers in the US have continued to sell e-books to us and other booksellers under traditional wholesale terms. They make up the vast majority of our Kindle bookstore - as a simple proxy, in our US store 79 of 107 New York Times bestsellers are priced at $9.99 (£6.31 GBP) or less, and across the whole US store over 585,000 of 718,000 US titles are priced at $9.99 or less.

Unsurprisingly, when prices went up on agency-priced books, sales immediately shifted away from agency publishers and towards the rest of our store. In fact, since agency prices went into effect on some e-books in the US, unit sales of books priced under the agency model have slowed to nearly half the rate of growth of the rest of Kindle book sales [Emphasis mine.].   This is a significant difference, as the growth of the total Kindle business has been substantial - up to the end of September, we've sold more than three times as many Kindle books in 2010 as we did up to the end of September in 2009. And in the US, Kindle editions now outsell hardcover editions, even while our hardcover business is growing.

In the UK, we will continue to fight against higher prices for e-books, and have been urging publishers considering agency not to needlessly impose price increases on consumers. In any case, we expect UK customers to enjoy low prices on the vast majority of titles we sell, and if faced with a small group of higher-priced agency titles, they will then decide for themselves how much they are willing to pay for e-books, and vote with their purchases.

Thank you for being a customer,
The Kindle UK Team '

The varied responses to the Amazon UK letter are an interesting read.

Background
For those new to the situation and interested in the background of the e-book pricing wars, the earlier stories posted here include:

  . WashPost: State AG probes Apple, Amazon over e-Book prices. What?
  . Amazon removes Macmillan books
  . Amazon surrenders to Macmillan and Steve Jobs
  . Steve Jobs pulls his puppet strings but says too much
  . Amazon plays hardball to keep lower pricing option
  . Why are some e-book prices higher than hardcover ones?


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

---

Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!