Amazon's publishing chief David Naggar has said publishers should slash their e-book prices to 99p to sell more books. However, publishers have retorted that this move would be "economically unwise" and would damage the whole book supply chain.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, David Naggar, v.p. of Kindle Content at Amazon.com, suggested that traditional publishers should follow the lead of self-published authors when setting e-book prices, arguing that a lower price point is a form of marketing which would encourge more people to buy digital books.
"I look at price as a tool for visibility. You can either spend a lot of money on marketing or you can invest it in a super-low price until they get the flywheel going of the recommendation engines - and this is just for Amazon", Naggar said.
He added: "What self-published authors will do is they will publish a book and sell it for 99p right out of the gate... Publishers [with new authors] could much more afford to do that than self-published authors. If I have two books in front of me and I don't know either author, and one book costs £9.99 and the other is £2.99, which one am I going to take?"
