Amazon Kindle. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
Amazon and Hachette—one of the country’s top five book publishers—have resolved their long and bitter battle over book pricing on the internet, and the deal appears to be a big win for authors as well as publishers at a time when the internet is driving down the price of books.
Hachette says it can now set the prices on the ebooks it publishes on Amazon—something that Amazon, one of the biggest and most influential book sellers on the net, had sought to block in the past. “The new agreement will benefit Hachette authors for years to come,” Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch said in a statement. “It gives Hachette enormous marketing capability with one of our most important bookselling partners.”
On Thursday morning, Amazon and Hachette announced that they have reached a new multi-year agreement for both ebook and print book sales. The two companies did not disclose the details of the deal, but both sides say they are amenable to the terms. The new ebook terms will go into effect early next year. Amazon, which had stopped selling some of Hachette’s titles and forcibly delayed the delivery of others, will reinstate the book publisher’s entire catalog.
Amazon controls around 50 percent—or more—of all U.S. book sales according to estimates. Though it didn’t create the first e-reader on the market, it was also a major player to build the ebook business in the U.S. after its hugely successful launch of the first Kindle back in 2007. But after the launch of Apple’s iBooks, with support from five of the world’s six largest publishers, Amazon’s market share took a dive.
“We are pleased with this new agreement,” reads a statement from Amazon in the wake the Hachette deal. “It includes specific financial incentives for Hachette to deliver lower prices, which we believe will be a great win for readers and authors alike.”
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