Amazon announces a 70 percent royalty option
 

from the press release:
So if a book was listed for $9.99 and was about 1.4MB in size, then the seller should now get $6.69 instead of (about) $3.49. Looks like Amazon has switched to taking an agent's commission rather than that of a distributor & retailer.

"Net of delivery costs" is a rather odd usage, but it makes it sound like they are subtracting distribution costs before calculating royalties. Any idea what those costs are estimated at?
Edited to add: Oops, sorry, I didn't read far enough. Haven't had my coffee yet.:o

Right. So what they get is pure profit.

Nope, not at all. It's income, not profit. Profit is what you have left after covering your costs.

Ok - In addition to - why would you want to use the old one? Or does that mean only newly uploaded stuff would get the benefit?

I hope it doesn't mean authors will use less images (or use ones with less quality) in thier ebooks to lower the costs.

reading on...

This is the fine print:

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• The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99
• This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book
• The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights
• The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech. This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store.
• Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. Amazon will provide tools to automate that process, and the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price.

The 70 percent royalty option is for in-copyright works and is unavailable for works published before 1923 (a.k.a. public domain books). At launch, the 70 percent royalty option will only be available for books sold in the United States.
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I just finished reading that over at Engadget and something sure has Amazon spooked...

Looks to me like Amazon may be returning fire at the publishers who've been pushing delayed, overpriced, ebook releases (and thus costing Amazon money). This move appeals to both the writers (moar moneyz!) and the readers (no geographical restrictions, lower prices, no limits on TTS).

Are you sure about this?

Hmm... I wonder who could that be.

Not only are they spooked, they've adopted the same pricing model as the spookers. If it were not for some impending announcement the spookee would not be spooked, therefore the only ones to remain spooked would be the authors. Good for writers everywhere.

Straight from the press release at http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix....977&highlight=:

Since the author has global rights by default unless they sell them, it's a nice tactic to encourage authors to keep global electronic rights, squeezing publishers out of the picture (and leaving a bigger piece of pie for Amazon), while also pleasing readers.

Excellent news. Much, much better than existing terms. For my book, RRP $6, 3.1MB, I think that means that instead of the $2.10 I get at the moment, I'll get $3.78. That's 63% instead of 35%.

-[EDIT] Hopefully it'll also be available to non-US sales shortly.

Excellent news. Much, much better than existing terms. For my book, RRP $6, 3.1MB, I think that means that instead of the $2.10 I get at the moment, I'll get $3.78. That's 63% instead of 30%.

I note that to be eligible for 70%, the title must enable text-to-speech. I wish they'd also insist on DRM-free.

This is huge news. I also see it as a major shot back at the publishers. At those kinds of royalties its makes self-publishing a no brainer for many types of books. If you are a new author hoping to become the next Rowling or Meyers you might want to use a big publisher (if you can get one to accept you). However, even then you may want to start with Amazon and then contract with a big publisher after proving yourself (and nothing says you have to give up your ebook rights). Even huge blockbuster authors can take advantage of this -- they have the clout to retain their ebook rights.