It looks like Amazon is starting to feel the pressure from the yet to be released Apple iPad. They have been pressuring publishers into accepting their prices for ebooks or suffer the consequences. It looks like Macmillan Publishing is the first one to pay the price.
After an negotiating session last week the CEO of Macmillan received an email saying that Amazon will no longer be selling any ebooks that are from Macmillan. It seems that it is not only ebooks but now it’s also their published books as well!
You can still get the books from third party stores that use Amazon but that means that if you are an Amazon Prime member (like I am) you won’t be able to get your books as quickly as you’d like. For me, this is a major downer. Especially since Tor publishing is one of my favorite publisher and they are under the Macmillan publishing arm.
I had mentioned in a previous post that I wasn’t sure what kind of ebook reader I would get, should I decided to get one. I think that my choices were just reduced by one. Based on this, I don’t think that I’ll be getting a Kindle. It is now between a Nook or a Sony ereader.
#1 by John Goerzen at February 1st, 2010
I’m of two minds on it.
On the one hand, as a Kindle owner and Amazon Prime member, it’s rather annoying.
On the other hand, both Amazon and the publishers were getting greedy. I’m glad Amazon has credible competition, as it’s forced a change there. But publishers are playing all sorts of “screw the ereader” games — delaying releases, pricing them higher than the cost of paperbacks at Amazon, etc. Shades of Apple vs. music labels abound. Amazon has the lowest ebook prices around, and even at that it still often seems too high to me. I am glad they are trying to keep the prices down.
As an author, and one who releases DRM-free work at that, I can’t say it pains me to see this happen. It’s the publishers that are insisting on DRM and are hurting consumers as a result.