@skuggles wrote:
It's my understanding that Amazon does have control over e-book pricing. This is from their direct publishing terms
5.3.4 Customer Prices. To the extent not prohibited by applicable laws, we have sole and complete discretion to set the retail customer price at which your Digital Books are sold through the Program. We are solely responsible for processing payments, payment collection, requests for refunds and related customer service, and will have sole ownership and control of all data obtained from customers and prospective customers in connection with the Program.
It states that this particular page was ammended September 2016, but I think the bolded statement has remained the same. They try to maintain competitively low prices. https://kdp-eu.amazon.com/agreement?token=eyJjbGllbnRJZCI6ImtpbmRsZV9kaXJlY3RfcHVibGlzaGluZyIsImRvY3...
By 2015, Amazon also renegotiated contracts with some big publishers allowing them to set their own e-book prices, which is why you see,“This price was set by the publisher.” , more than ever before.
"With the latest deal wrapped, Amazon appears to have reached a truce, of sorts, with the publishing industry. Since last fall, the e-commerce giant has successfully renegotiated contracts with four of the five big publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. The terms of all the contracts, per the New York Times, let the publishers decide their own e-book prices, but also gave them financial incentives to keep those prices low. Arrangements that give the publisher complete control over e-book prices are known in the industry as “full agency” models." http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/04/14/what_the_amazon_harpercollins_deal_means_for_e_book_p...
The information you posted from Amazon is for their self-published books published through their Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) arm. In KDP the author can choose the price, but there are minimum and maximum prices allowed. I have five books published through KDP and a short story about to go live. As long as your book falls within those price ranges (above the minimum and below the maixmum) Amazon lets the author set the price domestically. The page you posted is from their European operation and not the domestic one and pricing gets complicated overseas with value added taxes and other fees varying from place to place. Because of that Amazon has to retain the right to adjust the price to compensate for those issues.
I generally price my books at $4.99 (US dollars), but when you look at how that price translates into the various overseas markets, it varies from location to location. The price in Germany will be different from the price in England, Italy and Spain.
Amazon has only a little control over the price of traditionally published books. The publisher sets a wholesale price and then lets retailers decide on the price. In the early days of e-readers, Amazon would sell some e-books below cost to promote the sales of Kindle e-readers. The publishers then started to hold back digital copies of the books and insisted that Amazon could only sell the books for full retail price. Lawsuits ensued and Amazon ultimately won, but the publishers still sets the wholesale price of the books. If Amazon wishes to lose money selling e-books they now can and the publishers can't hold books back from them, but publishers have just increased their wholesale prices to force Amazon to either lose more money per book, or sell the e-books for a higher price.
Amazon would be thrilled to sell every new title for $4.99 if they could make money at the $4.99 price, but publishers will set their wholesale price now at $9.99 or more (typically more) and if Amazon offered the books for $4.99 they'd be losing $5.00 per book sold which they can't afford to do.
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