Why is Wiley Trying to Suffocate Kindle Sales of "No One Would Listen"?

By Stephen Windwalker

Originally posted March 5, 2010 - © Kindle Nation Daily 2010

 

John Wiley & Sons is not owned by any of the Apple Five or Big Six publishers. It is not owned by some global corporation based in Germany. It's a very successful publicly traded US publishing company that has been around for over two hundred years and is based in humble Hoboken. Wiley is known primarily as a publisher of academic, business, and technical books, many of which have traditionally brought prices that are higher than the usual trade book prices for bestselling hardcovers or new releases generally whether in hardcover or paperback. Many of these titles sell briskly, but it is fairly uncommon for a Wiley title to crack the top 100 titles in the Amazon sales rankings.

But now Wiley has a tiger by the tail in Harry Markopolos' new book No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, the story of the whistle-blower who five times delivered the goods to the SEC on Bernard Madoff in an unsuccessful effort to get the regulators to shut down the $50 billion plus Ponzi scheme. The book is likely to sit high on the financial besteller lists for months, and just three days after its release it is currently sitting at #31 on the overall Amazon bestseller list. Amazon is discounting the hardcover by a pretty standard rate of 42% from $27.95 to $16.34, and the result of the discount and the fact that Wiley has brought out a timely, well-told true story is that the publisher probably has its most successful book of 2010.

But the Kindle edition is not doing anywhere near as well. It's sitting right now at #156 in the Kindle Store. Why?

It's pretty simple. Wiley is apparently marching in step with other big publishers by setting the book's Kindle list price at $27.95. For the first couple of days after it was released the actual Kindle price was $13.83, which made it one of the most expensive new releases in the Kindle Store and dramatically chilled initial sales that might help to create buzz for a new release. But apparently that $13.83 price wasn't high enough, because as of this morning the actual "discounted" Kindle price has been raised 88 cents to $14.71. The book is being highlighted as "New and Noteworthy" in prime Kindle Store real estate, but, well, Kindle owners are very resistant to being charged hardcover prices for a license to read an ebook.

You would think, at Wiley, there would be a few executives sitting around who had read enough of Wiley's own books that they would understand the economic laws of price elasticity and demand.

But without getting too academic or theoretical here ourselves, three things seems relatively clear:

1. If the Kindle edition of No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller were priced at $9.99, it would be selling more than twice as many Kindle copies as it is selling at the current price of $14.71.
2. Rather than cannibalizing sales of the hardcover edition, the Kindle edition sales would actually fuel strong hardcover sales by creating more buzz and a higher overall position on various Amazon bestseller lists.
3. Markopolos, who never received anything but stress for his efforts to blow the whistle on Madoff, would be doing far better with regard to royalties if Wiley weren't trying so hard to suppress sales of the Kindle edition of his book.