Thursday, February 4, 2010
Hachette Joins Apple’s Anti-Amazon Book Club
Here’s another publisher publicly throwing its weight behind Apple–and against Amazon–in the e-book pricing war. Hachette Book Group says it will pursue the “agency model” for pricing e-books: It sets retail prices and the retailer gets a 30 percent cut. In more practical terms, this means Hachette’s titles will be getting more expensive, and the rest of the industry will be following suit.






Can’t really say that BusinessWeek’s 80-year run at McGraw-Hill ended on an up note, since the publisher sold the magazine for a fire-sale price.
I got a great glimpse of the future of magazines last week. It’s the March issue of Wired, transformed into a digital edition that takes full advantage of the Apple tablet we’re going to see on Wednesday. But you’re not going to be able to buy a tabletized Wired for some time: Condé Nast, like most would-be Apple media partners, simply doesn’t know that much about the device yet.










