It finally happened. The one hold out among the Big 6 publishers finally decided to go along with the pack. Random House will adopt agency pricing for ebooks for ebooks sold in the US starting on the first of March.
Bleh. This was not the trend I wanted to see. I was hoping everyone would go the other way, and stop screwing over the customers.
Here’s the comlete statement from Random House:
“Random House, Inc. is adopting the agency model for e-book sales in the United States effective March 1, 2011. Going forward, Random House will set consumer prices for the e-books we publish, and we will provide retailers with a commission for each sale. There are no changes to our terms of sale for physical books.
“The agency model guarantees a higher margin for retailers than did our previous sales terms. We are making this change both as an investment in the successful digital transition of our existing partners and in order to give us the opportunity to forge new retail relationships.
“We are looking forward to continuing to work with all our retail partners – both digital and physical — on our joint mission to connect our authors with as many readers as possible, in whatever format they prefer.”
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I’ve said before that there is virtually no chance of publishers letting go of the agency model. Guess Random House decided they had squeezed all advantage out of their strategy of freeriding.
Also with the possible departure of all other ebookstores from iOS they need to get into the iBookstore.
I am guessinga big part of the reason RH did this was because they want to be in the iBookstore and this was the only way. I think they are assuming that iBooks may soon be the only real ebook app on the iPad.
There goes all my discounted books I get to buy from Kobo when they have 30% of specials like last weekend.
Any idea if this affects Canada? I only see USA mentioned.
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