The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the deal Apple signed with had 2 price points for best seller ebooks: $14.99 and $12.99. This is good news.
If your first thought was that you refuse to spend that much on an ebook (I know I won’t), then you are looking at it from the wrong direction. As a rule, the publishers had been pricing these ebooks at the hardback price ($25-$30). Now the most they will charge is $15. Hopefully the other ebook retailers have price matching clauses in their contracts. We could all benefit.
P.S. Am I the only one who thinks that the Amazon Kindle has achieved the market presence of iTunes? It looks to me like the publishers are giving Apple a sweetheart deal on pricing because the market is dominated by Amazon. Am I wrong?
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This deal will probably kill the bricks and mortar bookstores just like iTunes and MP3s in general did to bricks and mortar CD stores. Plenty of people will probably flock to the Apple model because it’s Apple and very pretty and shiny. The only reason I would turn to Apple is if there is no DRM which is highly unlikely since iTunes only was allowed to go DRM free recently.
My big hope is that the publishers will not delay ebook releases to everyone else i.e. Amazon, Sony and everyone else. All the delay would do, besides piss off a lot of customers, is drive more towards piracy.
I disagree. The internet is killing off brick & mortar stores, not ebooks. Ebooks are less than 2% of the market. Amazon by itself is about a third of the paper book market.
I am not exactly sure how I feel about it. At first people will flock to apple since the tablet will be a cool new device but I think that publishers will like it because they, once again, will have control for pricing. They will be able to charge what they want. The $14.99 is a suggestion by Apple and nothing more. Apple will just take their 30% cut and not worry about it.