Hachette, HarperCollins Publishers, and Simon & Schuster report declining revenues on ebooks after winning the right to set prices in deal with Amazon
E-Book Sales Fall After New Amazon Contracts — E-book revenue is falling, and some people in the publishing industry say it is partly …
Context & Ripple Effects
The April deal that let HarperCollins set its own ebook prices — a multiyear agreement covering both print and digital — was framed as a win for publisher leverage over Amazon. Six months on, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster are reporting declining ebook revenues under those new contracts, and industry figures tie at least part of the fall to the restored pricing power itself.
The numbers back them up: ebook sales fell 10% in the first five months of 2015 even as print books and bookstores showed resilience, suggesting higher publisher-set prices pushed some readers back to paper rather than out of the market.
First-order effects
- The three publishers now own the trade-off they fought for: prices above Amazon's old discount levels are suppressing ebook unit sales and revenue at exactly the houses that won pricing rights in the HarperCollins-Amazon agreement.
- Amazon's Kindle store takes an immediate hit on frontlist economics, since the titles whose margins it conceded are the ones losing velocity.
Second-order effects
- Print's resilience — bookstores holding their ground during the same period — turns the agency-pricing win into a partial subsidy for physical retail, as the 10% ebook decline coincides with print strength.
- Amazon retains other levers over publisher economics beyond list price, as its later move to cut affiliate commissions and flatten rates across categories shows — pricing sovereignty on one axis does not end dependence on the platform.
Third-order effects
- If publishers treat high fixed ebook prices as the way to protect value, the next battleground is controlled scarcity elsewhere in the chain — the same houses later sued the Internet Archive over its ebook lending project, and library licensing restrictions have driven per-copy costs to an average of $40.
- The structural question the data poses: whether agency pricing permanently caps the ebook share of publishing, entrenching a hybrid print-digital market instead of the all-digital trajectory the industry once assumed.
The trend: Publishers are using reclaimed pricing power to trade ebook volume for margin, slowing the format shift toward digital and re-valuing print, libraries, and controlled distribution channels.