Amazon(AMZN) dropped the price of its Kindle — which dominates the market — by about $40 to $260 as competitors introduced comparably priced alternatives. There also are Barnes & Noble’s Nook, an expanded line of Sony Reader models and others from companies including Irex, Spring Design, Netronix and iRiver.
Sales are expected to soar for the devices, which display text on a screen about the size of a paperback. So everyone lives happily ever after with a technology that could change how we read, right? Hardly.
The e-reader saga is turning into a business thriller, as publishers and consumer electronics companies try to stop Amazon from amassing more power in this fast-growing field. It broke the digital market wide open in 2007 when it released the Kindle and offered thousands of e-books, including best sellers, priced at $10.

Publishers “don’t want Amazon to be the only game in town,” says Jim Milliot, senior editor at Publishers Weekly. “They view e-books and e-book readers as inevitable, but they don’t really know how it’s going to shake out.”

Several major book publishers tried to change the story arc this week by challenging Amazon’s $10 pricing on books — which others, including Barnes & Noble and Sony, often have to match.

The $10 pricing has infuriated book publishers, who make their biggest profits from hardcover editions that can sell for more than $25. To fight back, CBS’ Simon & Schuster and Lagardere’s Hachette Book Group said that beginning in 2010, they will wait until about four months after some hardcovers hit the shelves before releasing them as e-books.

Read the rest of the story on USA Today.

Tags: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Consumer electronics, E-book, Hachette Book Group USA, Kindle, Simon & Schuster, Sony Reader

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