Thursday 15 September 2011

More OFT Delays- E-Book Pricing

A couple of post ago I mentioned the news that the OFT (Office of Fair Trading) had delayed announcing the result of their inquiry into the Amazon/ Book Depository merger.

Well, now the investigation into e-book pricing, that was started earlier this year, has also not yet reached a conclusion according to an item on the Bookseller website today.

It's likely that many of the complaints the OFT received relate to the agency model pricing that a few UK publishers adopted for sale of their e-books. This resulted in some publishers telling booksellers the retail price that their e-book formats could be sold for, which certainly annoyed some of the major booksellers.

If you want to remind yourself what all the fuss was about then revisit my blog posts on the subject
starting here, with a piece about the agency model, and the follow up post here.

If you missed the news of the OFT announcing the e-book pricing investigation then see this post.

The e-book market continues to thrive in the UK and publishers are finding out what pricing works for them, but this OFT investigation could upset all of this.

So the evidence is in, now it's just waiting for an answer.

I'm fairly certain that when the OFT does announce the results there will be some very happy people and some angry people. But whether the consumer will be happy or angry I wouldn't like to predict.

I think this issue could go either way...

2 comments:

Rosemary Gemmell said...

It will be interesting to see the verdict!

Carolb said...

I agree Rosemary. I think there will be some surprises.