There was a moment in ebook history when things could have gone either way. The Amazon Kindle was flying off the shelf, the Nook was just getting started, and everyone was pretty happy about $9.99 ebooks . . . and then Steve Jobs came along with iBookstore and the iPad. And really, all this mess that we are in now was kind of his fault.
In an interview, Steve Jobs said that books in the iBookstore would cost the same as on the Amazon Kindle. Everyone assumed that he meant the then-standard $9.99 for new releases. And yet when the first images appeared on the big screen behind Jobs, one could clearly see books priced for $12.99 or $14.99. What happened to books costing the same in iBooks as on the Kindle? Well, they do cost the same; they just don’t cost $9.99. Jobs made a deal with the publishers to give them what is called agency pricing: The publishing agent sets the price, and Apple gets a 30% cut (their standard rate for iTunes). This has now become the new standard . . . and prices for ebooks have shot up to almost as much as printed hardcovers.
Amazon tried to resist this; they tried to stand up to the publishers. On Jan. 29, 2010, Amazon delisted Macmillan’s books from the Amazon site in protest over ebook pricing changes. On Feb. 5, 2010, the e-tailer relented; extreme negative pressure from authors and readers who didn’t understand the game of chicken the bookseller and publisher were playing made Amazon back down. One year later, on Feb. 2, 2011, Amazon even ended up joining Macmillan in paying authors for their lost royalties from the one-week holdout.
Well now things might change. Both the US Department of Justice and the European Commission have opened separate investigations into Apple and the major publishers on allegations of price fixing. This stems in part from a class action lawsuit brought in August against Apple and those same publishers. The suit levels serious allegations, and places the blame firmly on Apple . . . and Steve Jobs:
As a direct result of this anticompetitive conduct as intended by the conspiracy, the price of eBooks has soared. The price of new bestselling eBooks increased to an average of $12–$15—an increase of 33%–50%. The price of an eBook in many cases now approaches—or even exceeds—the price of the same book in paper even though there are almost no incremental costs to produce each additional eBook unit.
I love Apple products. Some would even go so far as to call me a bit of a fanboy. But I am not such a fanboy that I can overlook that one moment in time when Jobs changed the ebook marketplace. All of these troubles with publishers and libraries and OverDrive and ebooks; all of that can—at least in part—be seen as a less-than-stellar moment in Jobs’s legacy.