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Amazon Restores IPG’s Kindle Titles

25 May 2012

From Paid Content:

Two months after Amazon yanked book distributor IPG’s 5,000 titles from the Kindle store in a fight over terms, the two companies have come to an agreement and Amazon has restored the titles.

. . . .

Here’s IPG’s letter to clients:

Dear Publishers,

IPG and Amazon have agreed on terms; your Kindle editions will be available again through Amazon today.

I can’t thank you enough for your input, support, patience, sacrifice, and loyalty over the last few months. I only regret that we weren’t able to make up for all of the lost revenue when your Kindle titles were not available. We will continue to work hard for every last sale so that all of our publishers stay healthy moving forward. For the period from June 1 through August 31, 2012, IPG will not take a distribution fee on Kindle sales, and 100% of the revenue for these sales will flow through to our publishers.

IPG and our publishers also received a tremendous amount of support from much of the rest of the industry, for which we will be forever grateful. I feel that the experience has clarified some things for us and our clients, and that now we are all even better equipped to navigate through this rapidly changing industry. I look forward to sharing these insights with you in the coming weeks, and to continue to work on building your business through maximizing sales and reducing risk.

Sincerely,

Mark Suchomel

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7 Comments to “Amazon Restores IPG’s Kindle Titles”

  1. Interesting. I wish I knew what those terms were.

    • Me too, ABeth.

    • Clare K. R. Miller

      I am also quite curious.

      I also think it’s surprisingly generous of IPG to not take their distributors’ fees for a period; PR move, maybe?

  2. Patricia Sierra

    Translation: “Our ebook business went in the Dumpster without Amazon’s storefront. We begged Jeff to take us back and, thankfully, he relented.”

    • Is that the translation? I mean, yeah, it speaks to a certain narrative, but I don’t want to assume that’s the narrative that’s going on. It could be, “Amazon backed off on several terms because we pointed out that the original terms were a fast death for us, rather than the slower decline we’ve got without Amazon.”

      It could be, “We figured out how to trim things so we could still get a margin on the original terms.”

      It could be, “We started working on other ideas and Amazon caught wind of it and gave us better terms so we didn’t find a way to make Amazon irrelevant for us.”

      It could be, “Our authors whined at us till we held our noses and sold. Whatever. We’ll see if we can cobble together a golden parachute and they can all go KDP afterwards, the ungrateful wretches.”

      I don’t know, and while schadenfreude is tasty… Speculative schadenfreude doesn’t give the information that I want as a supplier, and false schadenfreude might be downright dangerous to me.

      IPG didn’t like the terms. IPG walked. Same as if an author didn’t like the terms a publisher gave, and walked. IPG returned — I want to know if they got better terms, or if they had to knuckle under (or die) because Amazon was a monopsony.

      • Patricia Sierra

        My translation stems from the “sacrifice” and “lost revenue” — sounds like they were on the losing end of the split from Amazon, and my guess is that they are the side that broke. If you’ll recall, the publisher’s announcement they were pulling out of Amazon had a whole different, defiant tone — like David was teaching Goliath a lesson.

        • I think it’s dangerous to make assumptions based on the “tone” of a letter, which could be interpreted a million different ways. Amazon obviously IS Goliath, but we have no idea what happened behind the scenes.

          Plus, this is a letter to the people who ultimately lost the revenue, so it’s GOT to be apologetic.

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