Amazon Bullies Writers, Publishers, Consumers!

[davidbcoe]

I'm a little late to the party with this one -- we had a storm yesterday and it knocked out our internet for a while. But in what appears to be fall-out from the iPad release and new competition between Apple and Amazon over ebook sales, Amazon has now halted direct sales of all MacMillan books, including Tor imprints, until MacMillan stops insisting that Amazon honor their price points in marketing their products. In essence, Amazon is trying to bully MacMillan, and by extension other publishers, into charging a certain amount for books. And until they get their way, they've pulled books off their cyber-shelves. Now, on the one hand, Amazon wants to charge less for ebooks than MacMillan, and the MacMillan price point is probably too high. But stopping sales of the books hurts authors and consumers, and given that I have releases due out this coming week and again later in February, I'm not happy about this. Not at all. Here are some links:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/amazon-pulls-macmillan-books-over-e-book-price-disagreement/

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/29/amazon-and-macmillan.html

http://sleigh.livejournal.com/283370.html

As my friend Laura Anne Gilman points out, this isn't about price, and it's not about saving consumers money. It's about control. Amazon is terrified of the iPad and with good reason. They want to maintain their grip on the publishing biz, and so they're choking off my sales and those of all my friends at Tor and MacMillan in order to get their way. Not cool at all.