Update: Amazon caves to Macmillan’s demands! Read on to learn more about the dispute:
After Macmillan Publishers challenged Amazon‘s pricing of e-books for Kindle users, Amazon retaliated on Friday by pulling not only all e-books by Macmillan authors but also physical literature by the publisher as well.
Macmillan is a large international publishing house with smaller presses such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt under its wing. Macmillan’s decision to pressure Amazon to raise its prices for e-books has caused Amazon to render its digital shelves purposefully bereft of books by authors like Jeffrey Eugenides and Hilary Mantel.
According to The New York Times, the dispute has developed over the past year as several publishers began to express their irritation about Amazon’s low price for Kindle books, which are all available to consumers at $9.99 a pop. In a letter he posted to Publisher’s Lunch, Macmillan’s CEO John Sargent wrote that he regrets to have “reached an impasse” with Amazon.com, but feels that the publishing industry needs a business model that insures “that intellectual property can be widely available digitally at a price that is both fair to the consumer and allows those who create it and publish it to be fairly compensated.” Sargent had been trying to get Amazon to agree to a system that would allow publishers to price e-books individually, within the range of $12.99-$14.99 for many popular titles, rather than all at one fixed price.
Since Amazon’s seemingly brash move on Friday, consumers have had to purchase Macmillan books through third parties on the site. As digital books gain popularity, it is increasingly more important for retailers to be able to provide a variety of online titles for their readers. An article by the Associated Press quotes that Amazon currently sells six digital books for every 10 physical ones of books it sells in either format. The release of Apple’s iPad last week adds another ingredient to this muddied elixir, as Apple has purportedly offered to allow publishers more control over pricing e-books.
Amazon and Macmillan have so far refused to comment on their feud. Associated Press writer Andrew Vanacore highlights how author John Scalzi, whose books have been released through Tor, a division of Macmillan, believes that Amazon’s move would have “a long-term effect on Amazon’s relationship with publishers, and not the one Amazon is likely to want.”
