Actually, one of the many cool things about eReaderIQ.com is that they do show you price history, if the book is being “watched” for price drops:

If you go to the detail page for a title, you can see a graph.

Many of the price drops, as I look today, are for HarperCollins books…

As to $9.99:

When I was a brick-and-mortar retailer, we knew that ending in ninety-nine connoted a bargain. Interestingly, though, ending in zero-zero connotes quality. I would have sold fewer luxury chess sets at $499.99 than at $500.00, but fewer books at $10 then at $9.99.

You can see the awareness of the ten dollar price hurdle in the price distributions I cite in my monthly snapshots. For example, on August 1st, there were 70,140 books at $9.99…but only 962 at $10.99.

Seems to me even some of the Penguin and Macmillan titles are ‘$9.99′ even though they’re still Agency pricing. The difficulty is that there’s no price history to compare to, so I don’t know if the price changed recently or not.

I do think that $9.99 is a magic number, i.e. resistance to purchase drops dramatically once it is below $10. It’s the same with the $.99 song price that Apple instituted. Publishers would do well to exploit this psychology and encourage over-consumption through appropriate pricing. I have at least a year or two of reading backlog, but so far it hasn’t stopped me from buying ebooks when the price is ‘right’. Unlike unread physical books, they don’t clutter up the bedstand and fill up bookshelves, and involve less guilt about not having had time to read them.

I do buy books for more than $10 but only when I am ready to read them immediately, or when they serve as reference books.

Good news! That’s just the kind of thing we want to hear with the ending of the Agency Model for some publishers.

One of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett distributes his books in the US through HarperCollins. One of his most recent titles, Dodger, is on pre-order. The price last week was $12.99. I checked after reading your post, and it’s now listed at $9.99! I’m much more inclined to order it now. In the PB days, I would wait for the title to come out in paperback before buying. I did the same when I bought a Kindle (after the Agency Model pricing); waited for the paperback release, then bought the e-book at a lower price. Now I don’t have to wait!

It might take a while to convert all of the pages…I’ll check more in depth later.

Yes, those three are not among those settling.

Random House adopted the Agency Model much late than the “Agency 5″. Penguin and Macmillan have not agreed to settle, and have (along with Apple) chosen to fight the DoJ instead.

that might be by book, because I am looking at Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and it says “set by the publisher”