EBookNewser has a short piece on Inkmesh, a sort of MySimon-style price-comparison site for e-books. The piece uses the example of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which “costs $5.00 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony. It’s $6.99 from BooksOnBoard, $7.99 from the iBookstore and $9.99 from the Diesel eBookstore, eBooks.com and Kobo.”
This puzzles me more than a little, given that I thought one of the chief tenets of agency pricing was that e-books were supposed to be the same price everywhere. If that’s no longer true (as this report a few days ago suggests might be the case), a site like Inkmesh could be very useful indeed.
I’m not sure how Inkmesh gets their information, but today (8/12/2011 @ 12:43 CDT), even though Inkmesh is showing $5.00 for Amazon, if you click through, you can see that the price is $9.99 – as it is for Borders, B&N, Sony, BooksonBoard, and iBookstore.
Inkmesh is great, but it’s not accurate. Click through on the links for any given store for this book and you’ll discover the actual price on all of them is $9.99. There’s lots of reasons that Inkmesh can be off, and even that you really can have different prices on different web sites, and most of those reasons are not contradictory to the Agency Model. See, none of this is “real time”. The publisher informs the various retailers of a price change. That change has to be entered into the system and propogated out to the web site. This takes time, and the time can vary from retailer to retailer, leaving you with a window of time where the prices vary. Then Inkmesh comes along and periodically scrapes the various web sites to populate their data. This also introduces several delays (it doesn’t appear that Inkmesh updates all that frequently, and it takes significant time to scrape this much data), making Inkmesh’s pricing information not all that up to date or accurate. Catch a book in a period of time after a price change and you can see these sorts of results. Now, the other report of Apple offering a book for free that no one else offered is harder to explain away at this point. Apple “error”?
The Stieg Larssons are published by Vintage, an imprint of Random House. Did Random House go with the agency model? I didn’t think so. Not all publishers elected to do so. Random’s not named in the class action suit. Unless they’re owned by one of those companies that *was* named. …? Anyone know more?
Could it have been an earlier price? I know that I only paid $5.50 for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in Feb. of 2010 from Amazon. The price is now $9.99.
@thorn, Random House wasn’t in the original group that started the Agency Model, but they adopted it this year. So, yes, those books should be sold under the Agency Model.
Alright, so maybe I’m missing something (and since Amazon do their best effort to put as many hurdles between me and buying e-books from them in my country, I don’t really know much about how it all works), but how exactly does The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo cost $5.00 on Amazon according to Inkmesh and $11.17 according to Amazon (on the very page Inkmesh refers to)?
As others have said (and I’m pretty sure it’s be mentioned on TeleRead before) InkMesh is in no way a reliable source for price information the prices it shows are usually months (or more) out of date. As far as Random House goes they’ve been an Agency publisher since March 1st of this year.