Publishers seek more control of e-book prices from Amazon

Amazon.com will have to give publishers more control over the prices of digital books to match an agreement the world’s largest Internet retailer forged with Macmillan, according to the Authors Guild.

…”Nobody expects Amazon to keep losing money on e-books forever,” Aiken said.

Raising the price of Macmillan’s e-books is unlikely to curb demand or hurt Amazon sales, said Imran Khan, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase. Order volume would have to decrease by more than 30 percent for revenue to decline, he said Monday in a report.

In any case, best-sellers haven’t been a big moneymaker for Amazon, Khan said. It makes more money on older and less popular books that it promotes via its recommendation search engine, he said.

Sales of e-books and the Kindle are less than 3 percent of Amazon’s total revenue, Benchmark reports.

Higher prices may help smaller retailers, which have had difficulty competing with Amazon, said Aaron Kessler, an analyst at Kaufman Bros. in San Francisco. Amazon is able to set low prices because it can spread the cost of doing business across a high volume of sales. It would lose some of that advantage if it were no longer able to keep prices low, Kessler said.

Amazon stopped selling all…

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Publishers seek more control of e-book prices from Amazon

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