eBook Discounting Slowly Happening Following Settlements

Like everything else about the traditional publishing industry that moves at a glacial crawl, the newly merged Penguin Random House is finally starting to lower the prices on the ebooks of its titles, despite having settled with the Department of Justice several months ago. In the terms of the settlement, the publishers had to abandon the agency model that it had formed in agreement with Apple, which made the publishers in charge of the price of the book instead of the retailer. What did not happen is a full-fledged return to the wholesale model; this model, employed by Amazon in which the retailer actually took a potential loss on some book titles in order to encourage sales of the Kindle e-readers, allowed Amazon to price NYT bestsellers as low as $9.99. Under the terms of the settlement, retailers can only offer a steep discount on publishers’ titles. But what’s taking so long for consumers to see some of these discounts? With Apple supposedly owing pay-outs to consumers who were squeezed on their alleged price fixing, surely some measure of compensation–at least in terms of new, discounted book purchases–is to be expected, but those discounts are not quite so widespread just yet. In an article on the pricing for paidContent, Laura Hazard Owen demonstrated some of the popular Penguin Random House titles that are only now beginning to demonstrate some level of price relief to consumers. Of the nine Penguin titles listed, the steepest discounts were on ebooks that had originally been selling for $14.99 and were now only $9.99 from both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Other discounts were less dramatic, saving consumers only a dollar or two from those retailers, while Google, Kobo, and Apple were hardly noticeable. In truth, some of the delay on price relief for readers may have stemmed from the merger between Penguin and Random House. Although Random House was not part of the DOJ investigation and had no apparent wrongdoing in the price fixing, it will now have to align itself to the settlement terms that Penguin ultimately agreed to and those issues invariably took some time to smooth out during the merger. eBook Discounting Slowly Happening Following Settlements is a post from: E-Reader News

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