With the trend started by the Amazon MacMillan spat, towards ebooks costing as much (if not a little more) than their physical counterparts, is being more firmly cemented over time, it’s interesting to see statistics from iTunes pricing model.

Looks like these bad boys will be sticking around for a while yet

According to MediaMemo, it seems that Apple gave music publishers the ability to raise the price of their music on its iTunes service early last year, which resulted in some record labels bumping the prices of some songs upwards, while others took the opportunity to drop the prices of certain tracks. The overall result has been an interesting one.

It seems that, while sales of digital content from those publishers who opted to raise prices have continued to grow, they’ve grown significantly more slowly than before. Warner Music Group’s sales through iTunes have grown by around 8%, down from the usual 20% or so that it had managed through the same period last year.

While this is all very interesting from the point of view of the music industry, it has equally curious ramifications for the sale of books on iTunes, a business into which Apple will be moving with the introduction of its iPad tablet device. Given the fact that Apple has been fairly widely criticised for the fact that the price of ebooks has risen on Amazon (with many citing Apple’s price point as the reason Amazon’s prices were bumped), it seems as though that price point might not last.

Indeed, if publishers find that content simply doesn’t shift at the prices they’ve set (and it could well be the case that ebooks are hard to move at the $15ish that iTunes is expected to sell them at), then it seems likely that we’ll see some kind of price drop in an attempt to spur sales.

As our country manager, Aaron, is so fond of saying, “They can’t charge more than the market will tolerate,” which is basically a business way of saying, “If it’s too expensive, ain’t nobody goin’ pay for it…”