Sony Getting More Serious About eBook Business, Now Paying 6% Commission on Sales, Offering More Discounts

A couple of days ago an interesting email turned up in my inbox. A representative from Sony’s affiliate program with Commission Junction notified me of Sony’s new affiliate program for ebooks.

For the first time ever Sony is now offering a 6% commission on the sale of ebooks from the Sony Reader Store. Up until now they’ve been one of the few major ebookstores to not offer any commission at all.

This shows that Sony is wanting to take their ebook business more seriously and try to compete a little harder with the big guns like Amazon and Kobo, both of which offer similar commission on ebook sales.

The whole affiliate commissions thing on ebooks is overrated, in my opinion. Speaking from experience, affiliate links are hardly worth the trouble of messing with for a few cents in commission. Then a few months down the line they decide to drop the program or switch providers and then all the links stop working so you have to go manually change them. It’s a huge hassle.

But what this will do for Sony is get them more links and advertising with minimal effort. Suddenly there’s now a reason for all the websites that follow ebook sales and deals and freebies to start linking to Sony’s ebookstore. Often these sites mostly link to websites such as Amazon that pay a small commission per sale to make it worth all the time and effort of tracking the ebook sales and deals and then posting about them.

Another thing I’ve noticed about Sony in recent months is they seem to be offering more discounts on ebooks lately with their weekly deals page and coupon code box (you can check a box to show only ebooks eligible for discounts when searching). Right now they are running a 30% off deal for the next few days on select ebooks with coupon code 30JULY13.

Coupon codes are another good way to attract visitors, as Kobo has proven quite well with all the discounts they offer. After years of apathy, it’s good to see Sony making more of an effort in regards to their ebook business.

If Sony can deliver on the upcoming Sony Reader PRS-T3 ebook reader, this could be a good year for them. And with B&N struggling with the Nook, Sony could really capitalize on the non-Kindle/ePub market.