If it wasn’t bad enough that the big publishers got together with Apple last year to jack up the price of ebooks with “agency pricing,” now it appears that they can’t even play fair with the rules they set.
Recall that under so-called agency pricing, publishers directly set the retail price of an ebook. Retailers cannot change or discount the price and simply get to keep a 30% share. One core tenant of “agency pricing” is that the ebook retail price must be the same at every retailer —that was the whole point, to shut down Amazon’s low prices.
Now examples are cropping up of ebooks being offered for free on Apple’s iBookstore that are still full price on all other platforms. Here for example, is the David McCullough ebook The Great Bridge in the Apple iBookstore just now:
Note that the ebook is free and the seller is listed as “Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc.” Now here’s the exact same ebook in the Amazon Kindle store just now:
Here the ebook is $14.99 and sold by Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc with the note “this price was set by the publisher.” The ebook is also $14.99 in Barnes & Noble’s Nookstore and at the Kobo ebookstore. And it’s not an isolated example. Folks in the Kindle discussion forums are complaining about other books, like Jennifer Weiner’s In Her Shoes.
With the just-filed price fixing class action lawsuit now looming, seems like an odd time for such price discrimination.
I just checked. The price is back up to $14.99. I was going to report them to Amazon, but they changed it too fast.
interesting post. i confess i’d never thought about the phenom of the ‘floating free book’ in this context. sellers & publishers can change prices back as quickly as they want, but customers still have documentation of the fact, in the form of the e-mailed receipt of purchase for $0.00. p.s. it’s “one core tenet.”
“Tenet.” Not “tenant.”
It was free on Apple at least as far back as Sunday August 7. I reported the price difference to Amazon then, and again on Tuesday when the price difference was still around. Jim Letourneau’s blog mentions the free books on July 26, and says he got an email from Apple about them two days earlier. (http://www.jimletourneau.com/2011/07/apple-screws-kobo-and-kindle/)
James Lee Burke’s Jolie Blon’s Bounce was free in the iBook store a few days ago and I grabbed it because of a Twitter post by Andrys Basten. Don’t know if it still is or not. At the time it was 7.99 for Kindle.
That’s just wrong.
Very odd, really, thanks for pointing this out! Of course, retailers do not necessarily react together instantly – and that’s one thing – but another could be perhaps a footnote somewhere in the by-now infamous agency agreement: perhaps selling “for free or at a very low price” is allowedfor a short, specified period? Is it always Apple the culprit or does Amazon also drop down the price unexpectedly?