- Image via CrunchBase
Amazon and MacMillan (one of the largest publishers in the US) have been in disagreement for over a year, the dispute being on the rice of its e-books. Amazon today pulled all MacMillan books off the Amazon store until further notice.
The New York Times explains:
The publisher’s books can be purchased only from third parties on Amazon.com.
A person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute, which has been brewing for a year, said Amazon was expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books. The person did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of e-books to around $15 from $9.99.
Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBookstore on the iPad tablet unveiled earlier this week.
Macmillan’s imprints include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt. Popular books, including “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah, “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel, “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides and “Finger Lickin’ Fifteen” by Janet Evanovich, could be purchased only from third-party sellers on Friday night.
MacMillan is one of the publishers onboard with Apple Inc’s iPad iBooks store. Unlike Amazon, Apple’s store gives publishers more leeway in pricing their content. The Times reports and others have speculated that the pricing will be closely tied to hard cover books, in the $12.99-$14.99 range, as opposed to $9.99 for the Amazon Kindle.
One of the ways those higher prices could be justified are the unlimited ways to add value to e-books on the iPad – such as adding video interviews with the author, animation at certain plot intervals, or with education – a chart the is alive, and changes with a constant link to the store/web.
Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg in a rapidly deployed video shot just after the iPad presentation that “publishers are actually withholding books from Amazon because they’re unhappy.”
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d5362d23-91d7-4a03-8936-f71a669d283d)