Good News For Amazon: Apple May Offer Best-Sellers For $9.99
Amazon’s (AMZN) e-reader business which fuels sales of its Kindle e-reader is supposed to be in trouble. The e-commerce operation has charged $9.99 for many of the e-books it sells, which has helped the company keep up robust book sales. The $9.99…
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Apple rode to the rescue of the publishing industry when it said it planned to sell e-books for $12.99 to $14.99 as it launches its iPad tablet computer. The Apple price points pressured Amazon to raise what it charges for e-books to keep publishers from pulling their content from the Kindle maker.
But, it turns out that Apple may not have been so generous to publishers and that the $9.99 price that Amazon has charged will be the industry norm–at least for best-sellers. The New York Times reports that “Apple inserted provisions requiring publishers to discount e-book prices on best sellers — so that $12.99-to-$14.99 range was merely a ceiling; prices for some titles could be lower, even as low as Amazon’s $9.99.”
An analyst from Credit Suisse recently forecast that the market share of the Amazon Kindle would drop from 90% of the e-reader market today to 35% five years from now. That projection was in part based on the notion that Amazon would have to raise its e-book prices and lose a critical competitive advantage. Apple may make the issue of price academic and that puts Amazon back into the driver’s seat when it comes to e-book sales.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
