There’s a bit of a surprise in store for you if you go to buy the electronic book version of the new J.K. Rowling novel, “A Casual Vacancy.” Despite it’s best-seller status, the ebook’s price is not $9.99 or $12.99 or even the high-end of best-sellers brought to you by the price fixing cabal of $14.99. Nope. At Amazon’s Kindle store it’s $17.99. And it’s the same price at the Google Play store, at Barnes & Noble and at iTunes.
How could this be? After all, the Justice Department smashed the price fixers and three of the big publishers, including Hachette, which sells the new J.K. tome, agreed to settle all charges and allow discounting to resume. The answer, it seems, is that “A Casual Vacancy” hit at just the wrong time.
Under the settlement, Hachette almost immediately had to cancel its contract with Apple’s iBooks store, the one that would have automatically priced the ebook lower while banning any discounting. But it didn’t have to renegotiate its contracts with others ebook sellers at the same pace. Laura Hazard Owens at PaidContent says it could be 60 days or so before new deals must be in place with other retailers. Once the deals are done, Amazon will be allowed to discount again. The giant online book seller already has a new deal with HarperCollins, for example, so ebook versions of Mitch Albom’s “The Time Keeper” are only $9.99 on the Kindle. But until all the deals are done, only Apple has price flexibility and it has little interest in discounting when all its competitors must sell at the high, Hachette-dictated price.
Some have gone so far as to argue that the high price shows consumers will be hurt by the DOJ price fixing settlement (see some of the comments on the PaidContent piece linked above). But when the only ebook retailer given price flexibility is the one that was among the accused price fixers and the one that hates to discount, it doesn’t prove much of anything.
Still, JK’s ebook is selling. It’s number 2 among paid ebook best sellers at the Kindle store as of right now. For a book with such high expectations, it’s hard to say if that’s actually a success or a disappointment. But assuming discounting resumes shortly, many folks may be holding off until the $9.99 version arrives. And while they wait, they’ve got plenty of time on their hands to ding the book with one-star reviews, it looks like.
UPDATE: On October 13, I checked again and the publisher on its own has cut the ebook price to $14.99. That may be because the book was slipping down the ebook best seller list at the original price. Then, at the end of December, with discounting back in Amazon’s control, the ebook price was down to $12.74.
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