Amazon halts sales of Macmillan books over ebook price dispute

Amazon has yanked all books published by Macmillan in response to a pricing dispute. Macmillan is demanding the site raise the price of ebooks to $15, a $5 increase over the current $9.99 price. Macmillan told Amazon they could purchase ebooks using the same model being offered to Apple, where Macmillan would get a 70% cut and Amazon 30%, or keep the current model where they get 50% of the hardcover price and Amazon can set the ebook price to whatever they like, but with the catch that Macmillan will refuse to release the ebooks until 7 months after the hardcover release.

Amazon’s removal of all Macmillan titles, which includes the Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt imprints, appears to be their answer to the demands.

Publishers are not greeting the exploding popularity of ebooks with joy. Many seem insistent that they hurt, not help, book sales, and most want to charge hardcover prices for them. Despite the fact that print book sales have been falling for years and the industry as a whole is struggling, most publishers stubbornly refuse to embrace ebooks as the future of book publishing.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Read [NYTimes]