For all the hardcore kindle readers there is bad news, Amazon has disabled the ability to buy ebooks in the Kindle app for Android. When trying to buy digital books, a new screen is displayed, letting customers know that in order to remain complimented with Google policy changes, buying ebooks is no longer supported. This has happened because Google has now mandated that all apps use their billing system and will take a 30% cut out of each transaction.

The policy is one that came into action this April requires companies with a turnover of over $1 million to pay a 30% commission on all in-app purchases on Android.

Amazon pulled the a ability to buy digital books in their iOS app back in 2011, when Apple implemented a similar policy, where they forced companies to use their own billing system. Since Apple users are more wealthy and buy the most content, this was a serious blow. To get around this issue, Amazon developed their Kindle Cloud Reader, which was designed to work with Safari and allowed people to buy and read books right in the browser. Amazon then doubled down on their official app for Android. They did this because Google did not actively enforce that everyone uses their own billing system, and this worked really good for around ten years. This all changed, when Google announced in 2021 that they would start mandating that all apps had to use their billing system by June 1st, 2022. Google said it would remove apps that didn’t comply with its billing system rules.

Why can’t Amazon just continue to sell books on Android and just pay Google the 30% commission on each title sold? This is because anyone who operates a bookstore and stocks it with digital content from major publishers is acting as an agent for the publisher. Major publishers such as Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon and Shuster, and Penguin Random House set the prices of an ebook and all retailers have to sell it at that specific price, this is known as agency pricing. Publishers only implemented this system in 2015, when Amazon basically set their own prices, and took a loss on every title sold, in order to spur Kindle adoption. The purpose of agency pricing is to level the playing field so nobody has a pricing advantage. This means, the profit for each title sold, is rather small, Amazon sells millions of ebooks a month, so they make lots of money through sheer scale.