Amazon talks lower royalty take on some eBooks →
From Amazon’s Press Release:
Today, authors often receive royalties in the range of 7 to 15 percent of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25 percent of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books.
Obviously that this is a response to other publishing platforms that take a lower cut than Amazon’s original 70%. Of course, if the rumored Apple Slate/Tablet is going to have the AppStore inside, then its a 30% cut is going be very attractive to publishers and authors.
The new 30% royalty has some conditions attached to it, such as max eBook price of $9.99, a lower than 20$ price point versus any pBook and it needs to support Kindle features like text-to-speech.
Nothing unreasonable, but on the same release you can read this nugget:
Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.
This type of pricing fine-print is probably normal in the retail world. However, in today’s flat-pricing online stores, it sounds more like a math test question.
Maybe my loathe of accounting is the one speaking here, but I think it would be preferable for Amazon to increase its cut by say 5%, and just charge the same across the board.
