The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Amazon offers publishers pre-iSlate Kindle bribes

More for authors, too

Disaster recovery protection level self-assessment

Amazon has announced it will give a 70 per cent cut of retail price to publishers who make their books Kindle friendly.

The figure is around double what a publisher currently gets, but the deal requires books to be priced at least 20 per cent below the dead-tree edition. Between three and ten dollars, the book must also be compatible with text-to-speech and any other functionality Amazon decides to throw into the Kindle in the future.

Amazon also deducts the cost of delivery, at 15 cents a megabyte, so a typical book will cost (the publisher) about 6 cents to deliver. That means the publisher of a $8.99 book will get $6.25 in pocket, rather more than the $3.15 the same publisher can currently expect.

The new deal will be available for books sold in the USA from June 30th, and only for Kindle titles obviously. But combined with Amazon's Kindle Digital Text Platform - which allows anyone with an e-mail account to sell eBooks for the Kindle - it should generate greater interest in self-publishing and put more titles on the shelf, for better or worse.

Amazon also reckons it will mean a bigger cut for authors, estimating that today an author will get between seven and fifteen per cent of the sale price, or about a quarter of what the publisher sees. But it's worth remembering that the bigger publishers negotiate their own fees with retailers like Amazon, so probably already get more than the listed cut.

Offering such a large bribe for Kindle-friendly content is going to raise eyebrows in the industry, and should certainly ensure that the Kindle platform proves a worthy opponent to Adobe's Digital Editions, even if Amazon produces the only compatible hardware. ®

Disaster recovery protection level self-assessment

More from The Register

next story
Apple patents facial recognition tech for mobile log-in
Handsets could display information and unlock by staring at your mug
Sony PS4 SHATTERS UK console sales SPEED RECORD
Quarter of a million next-gen PlayStations puchased in the first 48 hours
Apple prepping 4K resolution 12.9-inch MaxiPad – report
8.3 megapixels to aim at your retina next year
Apple bests Dell for first time as preferred US consumer PC choice
Tablets? Apple beats Amazon Kindle. Streaming media players? Apple beats Roku
El Reg's contraptions confessional no.2: Tablet PC, CRT screen and more
Sometimes old kit is the only tech that does the job
Android tablets to outsell laptops by 2017: IDC
Slab sales growth sliding as phablets and hybrids make their mark
Inside Steve Ballmer’s fondleslab rear-guard action
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love to touch
Desperate MS flaunts UNDEAD SPLAT TALLY to pep Xbox One fans
Daunted by Sony sales, firm talks up... hours played on Xbox One
prev story
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/20/amazon_royality/
www.theregister.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-48
54634
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KM47TFNTLBYEG2PQSNCHTVWEGH7LLGBH
<urn:uuid:089ecda4-ab9e-41c3-9b4b-733309452b5c>
2013-12-10T06:10:06Z
50.57.15.204
sha1:3OBHBUHRF475MEZSCLJCT4NZNTZDKI2H
<urn:uuid:2c0acdf9-e66c-4d2a-83fa-9ecb77d57cde>
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/20/amazon_royality/
response
<urn:uuid:73fe5dfd-cf2f-4764-ac26-175b1a577b22>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-33-133-15.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-48
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Winter 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf