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By Chris Meadows

image The New York Times’s “Bits” blog has a piece on the contracts Amazon has been offering publishers, offering them a greater share of revenue in return for “most favored nation” status meaning that Amazon’s price must always be lower than or equal to the prices at which an e-book is offered for other devices.

Given that publishers are now going to be dictating the pricing and Amazon is going to be facing competition from the iPad, such a guarantee may be more important than ever before. It’s also interesting to note that many e-publishing contracts still go only month to month as the publishers try to get more concessions from Amazon.

The article also suggests that magazine and e-publishers, unhappy with the relatively small cut of revenue they get from Amazon’s Kindle sales, may be planning to offer a free app for the iPad at the moment, then come out with paid products once Amazon is able to display multimedia as well.

Since Apple has handicapped the Amazon Kindle Reader’s online sale ability, Amazon is definitely going to need all the price advantages it can get. I suspect that publishers are probably going to see it to their advantage to keep the price the same across multiple platforms, rather than let Amazon keep the low price lead.

 
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