The Basics
To make a very long story a bit shorter, Amazon and Macmillan Publishing (home of many book imprints, most notably for this post Tor Science Fiction) have been negotiating re: the prices Amazon will be charging for Macmillan ebook titles, and the cut that Amazon will be taking for those e-titles… Anyway, it involves a lot of inside baseball, and for those interested in more of the minutiae, please check the excellent links at the end of this post.

But what Amazon did next is what will live in publishing infamy for some time: when Macmillan didn’t immediately knuckle under, Amazon removed the “buy from us” buttons from all Macmillan’s titles Amazon offers—roughly a sixth of all Amazon’s titles. Both electronic and paper editions. There are even rumors that Kindle users had previews customers had downloaded of Macmillan titles remotely deleted from those customers’ devices. (Didn’t happen to me, but I use Kindle on my iPhone, which probably functions differently.)

The Backlash
Cue the SF authors, who have zero control over the actions of either party, and who all have blogs and Twitter accounts to use as bully pulpits. And who are, as a condition of their employment with Macmillan, quite facile at expressing themselves intelligently and forcefully with the written word.

Sturm und Drang followed, in healthy measure. So healthy, in fact, that Amazon wound up capitulating to Macmillan’s terms, in large part thanks to losing the goodwill (and links) of SF authors across the blogosphere and Twitterverse.

What’s remarkable about all this is that this isn’t the first time Amazon’s downed the Super-sized Stupid Shake. The 1984 deletion fiasco and similar treatment of the UK’s Hachette Publishing established adequate precedent for Amazon’s acting childishly or arbitrarily when circumstances dictated.

What Changed
So why the (apparently effective) outrage this time? Well, for one, as I mentioned, this time Amazon, unwittingly or not, picked a fight with some of the most erudite and widely-followed-by-customers people in its target market. Never a smart business move.

But more importantly, Amazon’s not nearly the 800-lb. gorilla it used to be. Not even the one it was a week ago. The difference? Well, Barnes and Noble’s nook, to some degree, but most definitely Apple’s iPad.

Apple, of course, is well known for having turned the music industry on its head, and with iBook and its iBook store, it’s widely rumored that Apple’s going to be offering ebook publishers a lot more price flexibility than Amazon has done with its Kindle store. Amazon has garnered a lot of publicity, both positive and negative, for its unwavering $9.99 bestseller loss-leader price point, with a lot of industry insiders (myself included) of the opinion that it’s unsustainable. The debate over ebook pricing is a lively one, and one I’ll be trying to tackle here before too long, but not in this post.

The main thing to consider is that Apple’s rumored ebook pricing plan is a lot more attractive to publishers than Amazon’s. Since Apple’s emphatically a bigger gorilla than Amazon when it comes to electronic media sales, Jeff Bezos’s crowd found themselves waving a much less threatening stick than they originally thought, and have thus been forced to eat some very public crow by, frankly, a fairly nerdy group of people. People, however, who write, sell and buy a lot of books, some of whom have very publicly stated that they are terminating all relations with Amazon in the wake of this mess.

Signs of the changing times in publishing in general, and ebooks in particular.

-Thoth

Links:

• Macmillan’s statement (from Tor.com, because it’s behind a paywall otherwise)
• Amazon’s weak note

From many and varied author blogs:

• Some background from Charlie Stross.
• Tobias Buckell’s long but cogent unpacking.
• John Scalzi’s amazing summary.

Who am I? I’m nobody particularly well placed in anyone important’s upper-management levels, but I do work in the corporate office of a book retailer, and I’ve been an ebook reader and industry enthusiast/agony aunt since the late 1990s. My opinions on ebooks are well considered where I work (I’m occasionally brought in on the occasional ebook-related project as it starts), and I’ve got a lot of ebook-related opinions.

Why the pseudonym? Well, like I said, I do work at a book retailer that is doing some ebook work. I’m not going to be giving away any trade secrets or anything, but I don’t want to get myself or anyone else in trouble by holding forth here.

I guess the standard disclaimer applies: what I write here are my opinions and no one else’s: not my employer’s, not my wife’s, not my dogs’ nor my cats’. Just me, sounding off into the phlogiston-impregnated aether.

Should be a fun ride! Lots is happening in the world of ebooks (finally, after years of people like me waiting for the multifariously jammed logs to loosen), and there’s lots to explore and to say.

Stay tuned!

-Thoth