Random House adopts agency pricing March 1st

[Fbone]

http://www.randomhouse.biz/media/pdf...book-Sales.pdf

February 28, 2011
STATEMENT FROM RANDOM HOUSE, INC. REGARDING ITS U.S. E‐BOOK SALES MODEL
“Random House, Inc. is adopting the agency model for e‐book sales in the United States
effective March 1, 2011. Going forward, Random House will set consumer prices for the ebooks
we publish, and we will provide retailers with a commission for each sale. There are
no changes to our terms of sale for physical books.
“The agency model guarantees a higher margin for retailers than did our previous sales
terms. We are making this change both as an investment in the successful digital transition
of our existing partners and in order to give us the opportunity to forge new retail
relationships.
“We are looking forward to continuing to work with all our retail partners – both digital and
physical ‐‐ on our joint mission to connect our authors with as many readers as possible, in
whatever format they prefer.”

[abookreader]

I'm about as frustrated as I can possibly get with these companies.

You seem like a nice person so I won't play Shoot the Messenger today.

[FF2]

Well, see they waited a respectable amount of time before joining the price-fixing collusion of their fellow publishing conspirators.

[Fbone]

I wonder if Larsson's book will have price changes? We'll have to check tomorrow to see if two of them are still $5.00.

[library addict]

Boo! I was hoping agency pricing would be going away this year, not adding more.

[Worldwalker]

"We are looking forward to continuing to work with all our retail partners..."

That's easy to translate: "Customers: turn around, bend over, and think of England."

[ATDrake]

I guess this leaves Fictionwise with only MultiFormat and small press "Secure" books from now on. Unless RH is planning to still allow retailer-provided coupon discounts on top of their Agency pricing.

And here I'd been saying nice things about them for being a relatively sensible publisher putting up their backlist at reasonable prices and staying away from the Agency costlier-than-paperback/no-further-discount collusion.

Wonder how this will affect their sales, since my pet crackpot hypothesis has been that RH has been experiencing a boost relative to the Agency 5,

a) first for being non-Agency, which counts for something among disgruntled boycotters, and

b) second for having books to which one can apply Fictionwise, Kobo, and the rare Sony coupons to take the cost down further,

thereby making themselves attractive to ebook-buyers on two fronts.

I'm going to be uncharitable and hope that their sales experience a noticeable downward slide. Not enough to seriously hurt their e-book production department, but enough to show that customers prefer publishers whose books they can use coupons on.

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by library addict

Boo! I was hoping agency pricing would be going away this year, not adding more.

You took the words from my mouth ...

[Barcey]

I suspect that this was the plan all along. It would have been too obvious if all 6 did it at once (as if 5 of them at once wasn't obvious enough).

[wyndslash]

well, looks like i'll be reading more classics.

[fjtorres]

My boycott grows to six.

[tomsem]

So I suppose they felt they needed to get into the iBookstore after all (I assume that's the next announcement we'll be hearing from Apple). Too bad.

I don't really understand the mindshare that iBookstore seems to command from publishers and press. If Amazon has, say, 65% of the US market, and B&N 20% (shaving a little from their self-proclaimed estimates), there's no way Apple has even 10%. And with the end of Apple's virtual tablet monopoly this year, there's no way it is going to grow much from there. Yet publishers seem to hope that Apple is going to save their bacon.

From a consumer perspective, iBookstore is the worst value proposition out there: you can read content only on iOS, and only in the iBooks app (except for non DRMed material), it is a vastly inferior storefront to browse in (you can't even access the catalog or purchase with a computer browser), they have non standard features in their implementation of ePub standard, making authoring content more complicated, and it has this stupid agency model that eliminates competitive pricing.

Sorry if this seems a little off-topic, but in my mind Agency Model would not exist if it were not for Apple's collusion.

[Skydog]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

My boycott grows to six.

+1

[Catlady]

If I'd known this yesterday, I would have grabbed a whole bunch of RH books while Kobo's 30 percent off coupon was still in effect. Dammit!

[NightBird]

I would have grabbed a whole bunch of RH books while Kobo's 30 percent off coupon was still in effect.

save25kobo is still working and that's what I'm doing.

This is so depressing. I wonder if this is part of the reason CyberRead just decided to give up. I imagine this will really hurt Fictionwise, too.

Well, happy Read an E-Book Week to us. Yay!