Quote:
Originally Posted by tts52
On my iPad I have eReader, iPad Books, Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and Nook. When I buy a book I sometimes check all of the sites and invariably all have the exact same price. Are eBooks a cartel--there seems to be no competition.
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Five of the biggest publishers decided (from April 2010) that they would no longer sell ebooks to retailers for the retailers to sell to the public, but that they would require any retailer of their ebooks to instead act only as their agent in the sale, selling the ebook only at the price set by the publisher, with the retailer taking a fixed percentage (30%) of the retail price as an agent fee.
So yes, a book from any of those five publishers will be at the same price at all ebook stores.
This isn't a cartel. The publishers haven't colluded and said "all first released mystery novels will sell at $12.99 as an ebook". They each set their own prices for the books they sell.
The publishers (and imprints) who have agency agreements for ebooks are:
Hachette (Grand Central, Little Brown, Faith Words, Windblown, Orbit, Center Street, Yen Press)
HarperCollins (Amistad, Avon, Caedmon, Ecco, Eos, Harper, ItBooks, Rayo, William Morrow)
Macmillan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, FSG, Hill & Wang, Faber & Faber, First Second, Henry Holt & Co., Metropolitan Books, Times Books, Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Picador, Quick and Dirty Tips, Scientific American, St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books, Thomas Dunne Books, Tor/Forge, Orb Books)
Penguin (Penguin, Ace, Alpha, Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, Avery, Berkley, Dial, Dutton, Firebird, Frederick Warne, Gotham, Putnam, Grosset & Dunlap, HP, Hudson Street, Jove, NAL, Pamela Dorman Books, Perigree, Philomel, Plume, Portfolio, Prentice Hall, Price Stern Sloan, Puffin, Razorbill, Riverhead, Sentinel, Speak, Tarcher, Viking)
Simon & Schuster (Atria, Folger, Free Press, Gallery, Howard, Pocket, Scribner, Simon & Schuester, Threshold, Touchstone/Fireside)