RAND Announces New Pricing Strategy and Partnerships for E-Books

The RAND Corporation announced today that it has revised the suggested retail pricing on all RAND e-books to $9.95 each. RAND e-books are available through a wide variety of wholesale and retail partners.

"Our costs are lower for e-books and we want to pass these savings on to the public," said Jane Ryan, director of publications and creative services at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "Given the timeliness of our research, we want to make our work quickly available on multiple platforms, including smart phones."

RAND Publications collaborates with some of the leading companies in the electronic publishing field in order to bring RAND's research to a wider audience. RAND has developed partnerships with a number of wholesale and retail partners, including Amazon.com, Books 24x7, EBL/ebooks.com, ebrary, Ingram Digital/ MyiLibrary, netLibrary and Questia, to distribute RAND monographs as e-books.

Nearly 900 RAND titles are available for the Amazon Kindle 2, the iPhone or the iPod Touch. RAND recently has entered into agreements with Sony, to deliver books on the Sony Reader, and Overdrive, an e-book wholesaler.

"In the past, we based our e-book price on the retail price of the print edition," said John Warren, marketing director for RAND Publications. "It's clear, however, that the economics of e-book distribution are different than print, where the cost of printing, distribution and returns factor into the price paid by consumers. Color charts and a greater number of pages, for example, drive up the cost of print-on-demand, but are not a factor in electronic books."