Amazon Kindle Pricing Wars Have Only Just Begun, iPad Laughs In Background

Looks like Steve jobs has gotten what he wanted for the eBooks industry. He has been seeing that publishers are not too happy with Kindle’s pricing of their eBooks. Signs had been pretty clear much before the iPad was due, just when major publishers declared that they were going to create an artificial buffer time between the actual release and the digital release of a new title. They delayed the digital release of the new titles so that they could sell more hardcover books.

Riding on such discontent, the iPad did the opposite of what iTunes had done with digital music when it had just started. Instead of undercutting Kindle, they actually priced the eBooks higher. As a result, publishers got a taste of blood, so to say, and restarted thinking about raising the prices on the Kindle.

Now with the Kindle being the only kind on the block, it was hard to play hardball with them before. But with Apple’s entry into the field, it has become much easier to do. So it all started with MacMillan demanding a rearranging of the pricing for their books. When Amazon took out a statement last week about this issue, they did admit that MacMillan owned a lot of important titles and that they would eventually have to give into the demand of the publishing company.

The formal agreement of this was made over the weekend and now MacMillan books have the higher prices. While this might seem like a bad idea, given the increasing the cost of digital content has never really yielded good results, this not actually about sales at the moment. This is a strategic war between Apple and Amazon through the publishers. Apple has tempted the publishers with higher margins and Amazon already has a lot of users. Both want major publishers onboard and publishers want money. So in the end, more money is winning.

Following MacMillan’s successful price hike, other publishers who had been circling over this entire situation, are swooping down to catch Amazon themselves. Hachette Book Group and Harper Collins have both expressed their intention to hike eBook prices and I am quite sure that they are not just thinking about it, they will push Amazon into. Do keep in mind that all three publishers are part of the multiple publishers named as the iPad’s partner during the launch.

So over all, it seems like that when the iPad will launch, eBooks on it will cost exactly as much as they cost on Kindle. This is what Steve had told Mossberg during an interview at the unveiling and it has already begun to come true. Only, not in the way users hoped it would be.

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