Major eBook price change arrived Thursday, April 1

ALERT: April 2, 2010, 9:24 a.m. Central Daylight Time (US)... All eBook stores are now in the process of switching to the new agency pricing model. $9.99 deals on several of the publishers are now gone as prices fixed by the 5 Required Ebook Price (REP) publishers went into effect starting yesterday. Compliance is still spotty, but the publishers insist that all will be converted by April 3 at the latest. For example, Hachette's books, including those by Stephenie Meyer, David Baldacci, and James Patterson, are currently not available in Kindle format from Amazon while the publishers make this adjustment. It is unknown when they will return to Amazon's site. (We hope to have them back at BooksOnBoard by April 6.)
250,000 Titles - Including Our Most Popular - Still Available
BooksOnBoard continues to offer about 250,000 non-REP titles, most with discounts and rewards dollars available. If you favor consumer choice in prices, you can vote with your dollars by buying from the majority of publishers that continue to sell the traditional way, allowing you to price shop. You can search by publisher or author using our powerful Advanced Search tool.
Very popular authors still discounted include John Grisham, Gena Showalter, Linda Howard, Clive Cussler, Diana Palmer, Mary Balogh, William Bernhardt, Lorelei James, Jess Dee, Vivien Arend, Christine Feehan (backlist from Dorchester), and thousands more. Included among the publishers that continue to discount are the three most popular with our customers: Random House, Harlequin and Samhain. We also have over 1,000 other publishers including Sourcebooks, O'Reilly, McGraw Hill, Crown, Perseus, Hyperion, and Kensington. Imprints still discounted include Fawcett, Ballantine, Modern Library, Ivy, Del Rey, One World, Presidio Press, Villard, Silhouette, MIRA, Steeple Hill, Spice, Kimani, Gold Eagle, LUNA, Red Dress, and many more. Except in Texas where BooksOnBoard has legal nexus, you will not pay US or Canadian sales tax on these publishers' titles. (All REP books will be subject to sales tax premised on the publishers' legal nexus, which can include all 50 states and the Canadian provinces. VAT still applies to all product in our UK store.)
Rewards Can Be Used on All eBooks and Downloadable Audio
You will still be able to use your Rewards Dollars to buy the REP books (once they start to return next week) since these are essentially cash credits in your account, limited only in that they can only be used for eBook and downloadable audio book purchases. So, if you have a war chest of Rewards Dollars, you can apply them to the REP books. You will not, however, receive new Rewards Dollars when buying REP books because the publishers are not allowing us to offer them or other financial incentives.
Arrival of REP titles
BooksOnBoard has been assured we will have all titles from the REP publishers at the new pricing as soon as the publishers and wholesalers adjust their infrastructures. We expect much of this product to be restored by Tuesday April 6. Again, our over one thousand other publishers, including Random House, Harlequin, Silhouette, McGraw-Hill, Samhain and many, many more, will continue to make product available for you, without interruption. This represents 75%+ of all our catalog, so there is plenty of choice left.
BooksOnBoard is Ready
BooksOnBoard is ready at this moment to deploy the REP titles in compliance with the REP requirements.

Original release, March 25, 2010: In an move not yet fully described to BooksOnBoard and other independent retailers, 5 of the industry’s top publishers have advised us (directly or through our wholesalers) in the last week that they are imposing a Required Ebook Pricing (REP) model on all ebook stores as of April 1. This will affect all USA pricing, but the impact on our UK store is uncertain. EBooks from these publishers are not expected to be available on either of our stores starting April 1 until the publishers sort out the infrastructure to deploy this change. This could take several days or it may take weeks. BooksOnBoard is ready to deploy the changes once the publisher and wholesaler infrastructures are in place. The change, we understand, is likely to result in a significant increase in the net selling price of many of our popular ebooks. In order to keep offering these titles, we are required to comply, and we will, in order to continue to make these books available. The five publishers are the following and the action, we're told, includes all their imprints and their entire backlist (a full list of agency pricing ebook imprints here):

Hachette (publisher of Stephanie Meyer, David Baldacci, James Patterson and more),
Penguin (publisher of Nora Roberts/JD Robb, Lora Leigh, Nalini Singh, the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris)
Harper Collins (publisher of much Dennis Lehane, Christine Feehan, James Rollins, Johanna Lindsey, Diane Mott Davidson, Kerrelyn Sparks, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lisa Kleypas, Jodi Picoult, Jeaniene Frost, and Tony Hillerman)
MacMillan (publisher of Lisa Scottoline, Governor Mitt Romney, Terry Goodkind and more)
Simon & Schuster (publisher of Kresley Cole, Kathy Reichs, Sabrina Jeffries)

What does this mean?

We think that now is the time to buy for enormous savings that will go away everywhere on March 31

Since our average purchase is $7.76 for a book, most of our customers will probably still not buy these higher priced titles. Most of you have classically waited for paperback-equivalent pricing on your purchases. If the 5 publishers hold the same list price as they do today on these paperback-equivalent titles (and we have not seen hard data on this), your net price after elimination of discounts and rewards dollars, plus the addition of sales tax, can increase your cost by as much as 35%, depending on what state you live in and the current promos in play.

Very importantly, some titles may not even be available while the publishers and our wholesalers change their systems to accommodate the change. If you know you want to buy eBooks from these publishers, you may want to buy them right away so as to secure savings and/or availability versus what will be available Wednesday night, March 31st.

Sales Tax to be Added in US states for these Publishers

US customers will be charged sales tax on the titles from these publishers where you have not been charged sales tax in the past. This will not be true of other publishers titles, still representing the largest portion of our catalog.

Most BooksOnBoard titles are NOT affected by this

About 70% of our titles will continue to be discounted with our every day good discounts and Rewards dollars. Top publishers who will continue to allow you to enjoy discounts include Harlequin, Random House, Samhain, and more;

The 5 publishers titles will be at full eBook list price starting next Thursday in ALL eBook retail stores

About 30% of our titles – all the books from these 5 publishers – will be priced the same everywhere at the full eBook list price, which the publishers are now calling Required Ebook Pricing or REP pricing. (We're still hoping that many of these will be less than list price as set in the past.)

Some Popular eBook Authors whose titles will continue to enjoy discounts for you include, by publisher:

Random House: John Grisham, Stieg Larsson (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Jenna Black, Dan Brown, some titles from Eloisa James, Sophie Kinsella, Danielle Steel, Mary Balogh, Alexander McCall Smith, Clive Cussler, Christopher Paolini, Jean M. Auel, Linda Howard, Sapphire (Precious);

Harlequin: Gena Showalter, Linda Goodnight, Jane Porter, Susan Wiggs, Sharon Kendrick, Some Maya Banks, Diana Palmer, Susan Mallery, and many more;

Samhain: Lorelei James, Jess Dee, Jayne Rylon, Vivian Arend, Vivi Andrews, and many more

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