Are Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and Indigo making a wise move by not carrying the books from Amazon’s publishing arm, or are they cutting off their noses to spite their faces? This is the question that Mike Shatzkin addresses in his latest column. He notes that a reporter contacted him, undoubtedly expecting the same sort of attacks on the move posted by some major media outlets, and was rather surprised when Shatzkin said that, from a self-interested point of view, the decision made perfect sense. Shatzkin recapitulates the recent history between Amazon, the Big Six publishers, and...

The law firm handling the consolidated class-action lawsuits against publishers over agency pricing filed an amended complaint on January 20th. This complaint, filed against the “Agency Five” excluding Random House, goes into more detail about the alleged pricing conspiracy to force Amazon to raise prices, costing consumers millions of dollars. The complaint details how Hachette Livre CEO Arnaud Nourry first met with an Amazon executive in December 2009 and asked Amazon to raise its e-book prices by $2 or $3—showing that publishers had already been discussing how to fix e-book prices among themselves. Subsequently, these publishers all approached...

On Posterous, blogger Diego Basch writes about how the Amazon Kindle has changed his reading habits. It’s an interesting testimonial on how e-readers can change the way we interact with our books. As a result of having plenty of unread books on his Kindle, Basch now finds he doesn’t watch TV anymore—there isn’t ever a time when he no “next” book to keep him from watching something on the tube. He also finds that he goes through books a lot faster than he used to because he can also read them on the Kindle app on his computer or...

There’s a long-running argument about whether publishers consider readers to be their true “customers”. It’s probably rooted in the way that, before e-books came along and changed the market, middle-man distributors were how publishers sold the vast majority of their books. With the exception of things like order forms in the back of paperbacks, publishers didn’t need to worry about how to sell books to readers—the stores those middle-men turned around and sold books to handled that. They could concentrate on selling books to the middle-men instead and not think about the reader except in terms of making their products as...

Dan Gillmor, who we’ve mentioned here a number of times, has an article in the UK paper The Guardian about high American e-book prices, and how they have helped him rediscover his local library and used bookstores. When new ebooks were $10, I was buying them all the time. In almost all cases, book purchases are impulse buys – something you want to have, right now. I was buying new best-sellers at a rapid rate, and happy to do so. (The books I bought this way tended to be mysteries and thrillers – the kind...

PaidContent reports on a filing in a New York federal court from a law firm related to the antitrust investigations and class-action suits. This law firm, Grant & Eisenhofer, says that it should get to represent consumers because it has “special knowledge” about the industry’s price-fixing. G&E has been investigating this case since we were approached through counsel by an industry source in March 2011. This source provided detailed knowledge from his years in the industry that further spurred our investigation I wonder who that might be and what they said? As the article...

The Wall Street Journal article on e-book sticker shock that we covered a couple of days ago has been drawing a number of reactions. CBS Marketwatch offers a piece noting that the high e-book prices are slowing the growth of the industry. It points out that e-book prices have implications for e-reader prices, too, because consumers won’t want to pay high prices for an e-reader if they’re going to have to pay a lot for the books, too. The question is who gets hurt worse. According to the Journal, both Amazon and industry executives claim that...

Just how big a part did Apple play in the alleged e-book pricing conspiracy that anti-trust investigators are looking into, and the class-action suits that have been filed? Jeff Roberts at PaidContent takes a look at the allegations. Effectively, class-action lawyers claim Apple wanted to cut Amazon off from competing with its own mobile platforms for distributing media. However, Roberts points out, this may be putting too great an emphasis on the importance of e-books in the market. Unlike Amazon, Apple makes its money from its high-margin hardware, and the content is largely just a reason for people to...

Mike Shatzkin has another long and thoughtful post, this time arguing that publishers should change the accounting methods they use in order to pay authors more for sales of e-books. At the moment, publishers count the 70% of e-book cover price they keep under the agency model as their revenue, and pay authors a percentage of that revenue. If authors are paid a 25% royalty, for instance, 25% of the 70% works out to 17.5% of the e-book’s cover price. Shatzkin argues that publishers should instead call the whole price revenue, and account for the 30% as a “cost...

Mike Shatzkin has another fascinating essay in which he goes into detail about how e-books are priced by various actors in the e-book publishing industry. He explains that the break between agency pricing and non-agency pricing creates two separate standards—the “digital retail price” (of which agency vendors take 30% and are not allowed to change), and the “suggested retail price” (which is usually close to the cost of the lowest print version, and agency vendors pay half of to the publisher but can then choose to mark down for their own sales). The non-agency publishers who sell to Apple are obliged...

One of our posts mentioned and quoted a little of this story from the Economist last week, but upon actually reading the story I found a number of interesting points that bear consideration on their own. First, of course, is the whole “Ikea predicts the death of paper books” thing, which The Economist extrapolated from hearing that Ikea is introducing a new deeper version of its “Billy” bookshelves, meant for displaying stuff that wasn’t actually books. (It turns out this actually wasn’t true; the original 11” Billy will continue to be stocked right alongside the 15” deep version;...

The UK Office of Fair Trading investigation into agency pricing continues apace, the Bookseller reported the other day. The government office spent much of the year gathering price information, records, and documents from various publishers, and is now in the process of assessing those materials. The OFT has not released any details on what timeframe the investigation could take. The OFT has also yet to render another much-anticipated decision affecting e-books—the question of whether Amazon could be permitted to purchase UK e-tailer The Book Depository. Originally scheduled for August 30th, then delayed until September 2nd, the decision’s date is...