Amazon.com Inc. and Penguin Random House, the world's largest
consumer book publisher, have reached terms covering the sale of
digital and physical books in the U.S. and U.K.
Both companies declined to specify the length of the new
contract or the start date. Amazon, in a statement, described the
pacts as "long-term agreements."
Penguin Random House, which is majority owned by Bertelsmann SE
& Co., said in a statement that "we are still in business with
Amazon, and with all our retail partners, and will continue to
be."
News of the deal was earlier reported by The Bookseller.
Penguin Random House is the last of the five major book
publishers to sign a new contract with Amazon. Negotiations across
the industry have often become publicly contentious in recent years
as the online retailer's power has grown. Last year, Amazon and
Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group had a lengthy and bitter
dispute that focused primarily on e-book pricing and how revenue
should be shared. They reached a new agreement in November, but
only after Amazon took steps to block the preordering of Hachette
titles and delay shipments of some books.
An agreement in late October between Amazon and CBS Corp.'s
Simon & Schuster helped pave the way for a deal between Amazon
and Hachette. In December, Amazon signed a multiyear agreement with
Macmillan, a unit of Germany's Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
GmbH, followed by a multiyear pact with HarperCollins Publishers
this past April. HarperCollins and The Wall Street Journal are
owned by News Corp.
Those agreements enabled publishers to set the consumer prices
of their digital books but included incentives for publishers to
offer lower prices to consumers. A spokesman for Penguin Random
House declined to comment on the new terms with Amazon.
The No. 1 best-seller on Amazon on Thursday was E.L. James's
"Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian." The erotic
novel, a companion volume to Ms. James' "Fifty Shades" trilogy, is
published in the U.S. by Vintage Books, an imprint of Penguin
Random House. "Grey" went on sale on Thursday.
Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at
jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com
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