Re: Amazon Kindle

At 5:18 PM -0500 11/27/07, Dusk Peterson wrote:
>Elizabeth Burton wrote:
>
>> Print book distributors routinely require a
>> 65-75% discount off cover
>> rather than the 55% usually given to
>> wholesalers.
>>
>
>Well, I'd hate to start making analogies between print and electronic,
>because what I hear from folks who have gone this route is that Amazon
>accepts distribution discounts for print books that are as low as 20%
>(I believe).

These low discounts happen only if you go through one of the major wholesalers (Ingram Books or Baker & Taylor). You can't sell to Amazon directly in most cases, except through their marketplace and advantage programs, and even then you need to pay 55%.

The lower discount is only through the wholesalers.

In this sense, its a shame that we don't have an ebook wholesaler -- a place where ebook retailers can go and get virtually everything available.


>
>Amazon's self-publishing POD service, CreateSpace, asks for 30% of the
>cut (though, like all self-publishing services, it appears to pad its
>expenses through the printing costs). It seems more than a little odd
>to me that Amazon's electronic self-publishing service would take a
>35% *greater* cut than its POD service; one would think that it would
>take less work to distribute an e-book than a POD book. My cynical
>theory is that Amazon couldn't pad the printing expenses (there being
>none for an e-book), so it had to be quite obvious about the fact that
>it was making the people who use its self-publishing service pay more
>than people who sell their e-books through Amazon in another manner.
>
>So I guess my question really comes down to wondering why Amazon has
>all along (through Mobipocket) been requiring greater distribution
>fees for e-books than it requires for printed books. I hope the answer
>isn't simply, "It has the monopology on e-books sold at its store."
>
>Dusk Peterson
>--

I agree with Bill, they do this because they can get away with it.

Larger, traditional publishers probably don't let them get away with it, and set special arrangements with Amazon.

Kent



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