9

By Chris Meadows

images12[1] With the launch of its UK e-book store, the controversy over Amazon’s pricing has finally jumped the Atlantic. The Bookseller reports that Amazon has priced a number of books at less than £3 ($4.67 at current exchange rates), sparking a price war in which retailer W.H. Smith dropped its own e-book prices drastically, too.

[An unnamed] senior publisher attacked the pricing strategies of W H Smith and Amazon. He said: "It’s absolutely absurd to devalue our product but I’m not surprised because our industry is populated by nincompoops."

This publisher thinks that the low pricing might actually make the agency model less attractive to publishers, since the publishers are still getting paid wholesale rates no matter how low Amazon or Smith set the retail prices. However, I’m not so sure about this—after all, wasn’t that also the prevailing school of thought in America, too before Macmillan called Amazon out early this year?

And other publishers claimed they did not expect the low prices to set future expectations. Again, I wonder where these people have been while American publishers and authors have been scrambling to raise prices and then accusing unhappy consumers of having an “astonishing […] sense of entitlement” when they protest. It seems pretty clear some expectations were set over here.

I find it interesting that Amazon is going so low. £3, the equivalent of $4.67, is less than half the $9.99 price that got Amazon into so much trouble over here—even more unusual given that prices tend to be higher in general in the UK. It’s no wonder that UK publishers are going ballistic.

 
9