Amazon is the largest online e-book retailer in the world and they have around 75% market share in the United States and 95% in the United Kingdom. Millions of people buy Kindle books on a weekly basis and sometimes after you buy one, the price goes down. Amazon does not price match e-books, even if the price changes a day after you purchased it.
Price matching e-books is something that does not happen in the industry. Most companies do not have the will to develop an infrastructure to give people a chance to get a small credit in their account to makeup the difference. The primarily reason for this is e-book revenue for the agent (Amazon) is fairly paltry and they try to never cut into their profit margins.
The only company to offer a price match system is Kobo. Their system is only available to customers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Customers from these countries who buy an eBook from Kobo and find the same one on another website for a lower price can ask Kobo to credit them the difference between the competitor’s advertised price and their Kobo purchase price (excluding taxes), plus 10% of the competitor’s price.
I think Kobo is doing something really great and is demonstrating a solid startup mentality with this initiative.  They are offering something that the competition is not doing and hope that a number of hardcore readers who buy a lot of e-books will flock to your ecosystem to save money.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
