The interesting thing with Kindle books (self-publishing) is if you price the book between $2.99 and $9.99, your commission is 70%. But if you price it over or under that range, it's only 35%.<p>So a $7400 book would be $4810 for Amazon and only $2590 for the author.
It's not an e-book, and among paper books it's not even close: a bidding war between two pricing algorithms famously led to a $23 MILLION price tag: <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384102,00.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384102,00.asp</a><p>I wouldn't be surprised if something similar has happened in this case as well, and there may have been more extreme cases before.
I don't know if the price is hidden to me because I'm in the UK, but that one is apparently only available in hardback.<p>This one, however... <a href="http://www.amazon.com/International-Encyclopedia-Social-Behavioral-Sciences-ebook/dp/B00D8GA5G2/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/International-Encyclopedia-Social-Beha...</a><p>$16,315.96 on Kindle.
That book is a famous reference book, it's not supposed to be bought by individuals, but by university libraries. The price is so high because a more reasonable price would be a "drop in the ocean" for a typical library, and they might as well give it away for free then. So they choose a price as high as the libraries can pay.<p>It reminds me a bit of the pricing of scientific journals. They are basically just magazines, but horrendously expensive because they are marketed towards libraries. The difference to this is that you can buy individual articles. To keep the libraries buying, they also put a ridiculous price on the articles, like $45 a piece. People are not supposed to buy them individually either, its just to keep the price up (and the articles formally available).
I don't know if this is the case for this book, but really interesting article about how some items on Amazon can get outrageous prices<p><a href="http://www.dansdata.com/gz146.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.dansdata.com/gz146.htm</a>
The e-book (kindle-edition) is not available where I live, but I see I can acquire a hardcopy for just $7,400.50.<p>That's literally a steal! Actually, <i>double</i> so!
And it has been consistently expensive.
<a href="http://camelcamelcamel.com/Nuclear-Energy-Landolt-B%C3%B6rnstein-Relationships-Technologies/product/3540428917" rel="nofollow">http://camelcamelcamel.com/Nuclear-Energy-Landolt-B%C3%B6rns...</a>
The book is available in hardcover only so it's not the most expensive e-book ...<p>Bit I guess when you're serious about nuclear energy, 7500$ is probably relatively cheap ;-)
not sure if the link is affiliate spam, in any case here is a stripped down sanitised one: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001C2TPWO/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001C2TPWO/</a>