Amazon Fail - Again
Although to be fair it seems this time Macmillan publishing is part of the problem as well.
I've been catching up on my F-List and found out that sometime Friday evening Amazon stopped selling any title published by Macmillan due to some sort of dispute over the cost of e-books. Now Macmillan has a lot of imprints - like Tor - so nearly half of my wish list is "currently unavailable" at amazon.com. They are still listed as being available by third party sellers but if I want to order directly from Amazon, get their discount, or take advantage of super saver shipping? Not so much.
Seems Macmillan wants to be able to raise the price of e-books to $15 while Amazon wants to keep them at $9.99. The publisher feels it should be able to set the price just like they do with print books (although really, $15 for an e-book? Get real. People that use e-readers already complain that $10 is too expensive). They say that if Amazon wants to keep their price point then the e-book won't be available until later - kind of like the hardback comes out first at $30 bucks a pop then 8-12 months later you get a trade paperback at $15 then 8-12 months after that you finally get a mass market paperback at $8. When the e-book would be available is anyones guess but I'd venture to say sometime around the time of the trade paperback.
Amazon evidently didn't like this one bit because they want to keep the price point where it is so they can sell more Kindle e-readers. Given the latest announcement from Apple and the new iBooks coming soon the timing of this whole cluster seems like much less of a coincidence. So both sides end up playing hardball and Amazon took the rather amazing (amazingly stupid) step of pulling all Macmillan titles - in ALL formats.
I am not a fan of e-books. I don't own an e-reader nor do I want one. I like books - real books made from paper. Ones I can hold in my hands and touch and smell. The electronic version just doesn't do it for me. So if Amazon had pulled the Kindle versions of all those Macmillan books but left the other formats alone I probably wouldn't even have noticed. But they pulled everything, which to me seems like a serious case of overkill.
The true victims of all this corporate chest thumping are the writers whose books are no longer available (because really - they do not have any control over this) and the readers. There are calls all over the internet to close out your Amazon account, e-mail to tell them why, only buy from independent bookstores or Powell's, etc.
Me, I'm taking a wait and see approach but after Amazon's previous epic failures (delisting gay and lesbian content, pulling back Orwell's 1984 (e-version) from people who had already paid for it) I'm having a hard time even considering giving them any more of my business. Because this is not an accident or a glitch, my friends. This is business, and a very foul business indeed.
For more information check out Cory Doctrow and John Scalzi. (No, I didn't link to a specific post at Scalzi's site. That is because 1) he has several entries about the situation and 2) you should be reading him every day anyway).