Selling Kindle Books Below Cost

The New York Times reports on the eBook for Kindle pricing by Amazon.com. Most books go for $9.99 According to the report, most books are sold below cost, because the publishers sell the books at the same cost of print books.

Amazon sells most Kindle books for $9.99 or less. Publishers say that they generally sell electronic books to Amazon for the same price as physical books, or about 45 percent to 50 percent of the cover price.

The Kindle itself goes for $399, while the books are sold at a a lower price than print books. A model that very much resembles the iPod and iTunes songs pricing model. But Apple's strategy was to sell more iPods and the iTunes was just part of the ecosystem. Amazon on the other hand sated the change in the way books will be read in the future and made Kindle as part of its strategy to lead the next version of books. If Amazon wants to dominate the format it should have priced the Kindle at a lower price and charged a higher price (at least above the cost) to grab market share.

So why would Amazon price below cost? Conversely why would the publishers charge the same for eBook when they do not incur the same cost of physical books, like materials, labor , warehousing and distribution costs? The questions are related but the answers are not.

First the publishers see a very small uptake for eBooks while there are 100 million people who still buy physical books. The do not need Amazon's Kindle, but Amazon needs them. So they do not need to give a price rent to Amazon. They may be uncertain about DRM protection. Any sale they make on Kindle comes at the expense of the physical book sales (cannibalization), so they want Kindle sale to pay the same margin. They also do not want to discount the eBook for fear of the low price expectation creeping into physical books market.

For Amazon, I do not know why they do not do the Razor-Blade pricing. If they want to gain upper hand in the channel relation they should have priced Kindle lower than $399. The books on Kindle also provide value added features that are not available on a physical book, like search, font magnification for easy reading, convenience etc. So they should charge higher than $9.99 for Kindle books. The possible reason is that their margin on Kindle is already low and they can' cut further. On the other hand, they must be thinking that eventually they can convince publishers to cut their prices.

By some measures there are 10,000 Kindles in consumer hands. The next move will depend on how the Kindle's customer base will grow over the next 12 months.