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Amazon.com is offering independent booksellers the opportunity to sell Kindle e-readers.
The company will give US indies 10% commission for every Kindle e-book bought on the device sold by the indie bookseller for two years after the e-reader was sold.
The 10% commission figure is believed to be slightly higher than the figure Kobo offers independent booksellers in the UK and also higher than that offered by Gardners’ Hive network to indies here. However, the National Book Tokens e-book platform offers independents the highest commission on e-books of all the platforms at 17.5%.
Via the scheme, which Amazon is dubbing Amazon Source, independent booksellers can choose to gain a higher discount on purchasing Kindle devices from Amazon rather than a 10% discount on e-books sales after the device is sold, if they prefer.
Russ Grandinetti, vice-president of Amazon Kindle, said: “We believe that retailers, online or offline, small or large, should be striving to offer customers what they want—and many customers want to read both digital and print books. For many years, bookstores have successfully sold print books on Amazon—now Amazon Source extends this opportunity to digital. With Amazon Source, customers don’t have to choose between e-books and their favorite neighborhood bookstore—they can have both.”
In the UK, Waterstones stores have now been selling Kindle e-readers for just over a year. Its managing director James Daunt is quoted in the Amazon press release sent out today (6th November), commenting: “It is a truly exciting prospect to harness the respective strengths of Waterstones and Amazon to provide a dramatically better digital reading experience for our customers.
"Alongside Amazon, we have married the best digital readers, the Kindle family, to the singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop. With the combination of our talents we are on our way to offering the exceptional customer proposition to which we both aspire.”
Amazon Source has launched after pilot schemes with some booksellers in the US.