More on iBookstore pricing

I see this whole ebook thing becoming a real mess before it gets sorted out. I think that some publishers will choose to cut out the middleman and will just end up creating their own free apps that they can sell books through. I don't want this to happen but I fear it will. I am currently planning to wait for a 2nd gen iPad (or at least a price drop on the first gen) so I hope that by the time I join the party they will have all this stuff sorted out.

$9.99 seems like a very nice price point for new releases to me. I hope to see older titles at around the $4.99 price and I am really hoping to see publishers make a major effort to release ebook versions of older out of print titles.

"The pricing war that's about to erupt between the Kindle, Nook and iBookstore will be interesting to watch."

There will be no pricing war. Apple will stick to their model and publishers who want to sell through the iBookstore are contractually bound to offer the same terms and pricing to all resellers.

What may happen is that some books will only be available from one reseller. That's certainly what Amazon is trying to achieve by threatening to stop selling physical copies, which is still how the vast majority of books are consumed. Long term that won't work, and Amazon knows it.

"After receiving pressure from its publishers, Amazon altered their arrangement to mimic Apple's."

As with all the stories you've linked to, this still is simply not true. Amazon did indeed alter their arrangement, but it's still a vastly different (and more publisher-hostile) arrangement than Apple's.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html

Bravo- this totally rocks and I hope it forces Amazon to change some of their other unfair content pricing schemes as well. As an indie filmmaker, I'm interested in distributing my movies through Amazon's Unbox service. However as the content creator you have zero control over the final price. That means whatever price Amazon arbitrarily picks you have to use that price elsewhere as well- or you risk being undersold on your own stuff. And they take up to 30 days to remove your movie if you ask them to. It's just preposterously unfair to the content creator. I assume publishers were feeling the same pain with Amazon's book pricing. So again, bravo Apple.

Nine days and the world becomes a new and wonderful place!!!