$3.65. $91.48. $1.46. $11.20.
All over the Internet this week, e-book readers – more specifically, Kindle owners – were swapping numbers. More specifically, how much had they received in credit toward future purchases of e-books as their share of the $166 million e-book price-fixing settlement reached with five publishers and applying to customers in 33 states.
The events that led to what for some was a windfall and for others a token payout all began back in 2010. The late Apple founder Steve Jobs essentially sat down with top execs of major publishing companies – HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin (now part of Penguin Random House) and Macmillan – and offered them a new pricing arrangement known as an “agency” deal, according to the Justice Department.
Under the new terms, the publisher could set the retail price of the e-book and collect a share as a commission, rather than letting the retailer (whether a bricks-and-mortar outlet like famed indie sellers Strand of New York or Powell’s on the West Coast, or online behemoth Amazon) pay a wholesale price to the publisher and then discount or not as they chose.
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In Kindle-land, discounting had become the norm, with $9.99 becoming the common price-point and customers boycotting books priced north of $10, often posting hostile one-star reviews commenting not on the books merits but on its price.
Once the agency deal kicked in, Kindle devotees – myself among them – felt the pain almost immediately. A new novel, instead of being $9.99, was $13.99, or even more. According to the DOJ lawsuit, the aim of the arrangement between the publishers and Apple was to keep retail e-book prices between $12.99 and $14.99 apiece. The publishers settled the claims; Apple was convicted in a trial by a federal judge.
It’s been more than 18 months since we were first told that three of the publishers had agreed to pay refunds as part of their settlement with the DOJ, but it seemed to take forever to dot the I’s, cross the T’s and put the check in the mail. Now book buyers are finally getting credits from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Apple. Sony e-book buyers will get checks. Most book-buyers are getting $3.17 for every New York Times bestseller and 73 cents for other titles.
That’s why the Internet has been buzzing as the literati digerati try to figure out who got how much.
Mine? Well, it was a big one. In fact, only one fellow bibliomaniac I know got more. My e-mail from Amazon yesterday morning informed me that I now have a credit of $191.59 in my account.
“Oh, it was wonderful,” another avid reader, Becky Roorda, says of her $38.94 Amazon credit. “It’s found money!”
Roorda often eyes the prices of Kindle books today, wrinkles her nose and deems them to still be too pricey for her – perhaps $3 or $4 too much – compared to the cost of a second-hand paperback or hardcover book. She likes to be thrifty – but she also likes to read on her Kindle. “I do almost half of my reading now on my Kindle compared to only about 5 percent only a year or two ago,” she says. “So this will mean I’ll go for one or two of those expensive books, I suspect.”
Then there are those tempting, periodic 99-cent Daily Deals that Amazon started in 2010. Every morning, Roorda and I and millions of other Kindle book readers wake up to see what bargains we can snag. Last week, an array of novels by Italo Calvino was offered for $1.99 each. “That credit adds up to a lot of those $2 books,” says Missouri-based Roorda.
I confess I’ve already succumbed. Within 30 minutes, a copy of Leslie Marmon Silko’s iconic novel Ceremony was on my Kindle, and I had placed an order for a book that’s due out next week. Really, how can you quibble about a title like, “Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet”? Besides, the author (Amara Lakhous) is a new discovery of mine, and the publisher (independent Europa Editions) is a favorite, always drawing my attention to new and interesting books. So thanks, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, for letting me bolster Europa’s bottom line.
A Win for Amazon
One of the arguments that the publishers and Apple raised in their own defense was that they were trying to stop Amazon from taking over the e-book market (albeit at the expense – literally – of the book buying public). As it turns out, the settlement may indeed reinforce Amazon’s dominance of that market. To the extent that I’m buying books in the coming months, I’ll be using my windfall, which means I’ll be spending it on Amazon.
I’m not altogether comfortable about the long-term implications of that. I love my Kindle, and life without it is a deeply terrifying prospect. Yet I’m also cynical enough not to want my fate tied to Amazon — or any other corporate entity. I don’t like not being able to resell my digital books, or lend them to friends, in the very same way that I can my “dead tree books.” Nor do I want Amazon to drive book prices so low – temporarily – that it captures the market and then uses that dominance to squeeze competitors out of the business. I don’t want to be reliant on a single purveyor of books any more than I’d want to rely on a single publisher or author.
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I’d love to see a thriving book publishing industry, one in which there is room for authors and publishers to make money and yet where discounting is still possible, making it possible for bibliomaniacs like myself to pursue our heart’s desire: building up libraries larger than we will ever be able to read during our lifetimes. Because there is a fate worse than death, and it’s one that anyone involved in any part of the book business is all too familiar with: being without something to read.
As far as solving that problem goes, well, $191.59 strikes me as a fairly nice number.
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