Amazon bumps Kindle royalty rate

Jake Widman
Thursday, 21 January 2010 02:41

Your IT - Mobility

Amazon has announced a new royalty structure for authors using the company's Kindle Digital Text Platform to publish their books. The new rate matches the terms Apple is reportedly ready to offer book publishers.

The new program pays 70 percent of the book's list price, after delivery costs.

That's the same rate an analyst said in December that Apple was offering book publishers in an effort to line up content for its expected slate.

The higher rate doesn't replace the existing Kindle split, it's an additional option, and the author or publisher who wants to take advantage of it must meet a few restrictions:

- The book's list price must be set between US$2.99 and $9.99 and must be at least 20% lower than any physical version of the book.

- The title is available anywhere the author or publisher has rights to it.

- The book must support many of the features of the Kindle store, including text-to-speech.

- The book must be in copyright and published later than 1922 (i.e., no public domain books).

Delivery costs are 15 cents per MB. According to Amazon's calculations, an author publishing an $8.99 book will make $6.25 under the new program, compared with $3.15 under the standard rate.