Macmillan ceo John Sargent has commented on what happens next between the publisher and Amazon, a first answer to the what kind of timeline “ultimately” means for the restoration of buy buttons: “We are in discussions with Amazon on how best to resolve our differences. They are now, have been, and I suspect always will be one of our most valued customers.”
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Plus the Macmillan Titles Amazon Kept Selling All Along
Before Amazon posted their announcement about their intention to give in to Macmillan’s new terms, we were working on this piece. Even when Amazon removed buy buttons from Macmillan’s trade division titles, they kept selling books from Macmillan’s Palgrave line. Primarily a scholarly publisher, in recent years Palgrave has also expanded its trade books. Not only did the buy buttons stay active for the Palgrave trade titles, for those new releases with Kindle editions, Amazon was already selling the ebook versions for the “needlessly high” as they would put it price $15 in many cases. As we have written many […]
Amazon: "ultimately, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms"
Could publishers have triumphed so quickly with their strategy to use Apple’s entry into the market to move to an agency model for selling ebooks? (Note that the etailer says “ultimately.” Immediately after posting this “announcement,” disabled Macmillan buy buttons had not been restored yet.) Early Sunday evening, The Amazon Kindle team has just posted this to a forum on their site: Dear Customers: Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions […]
The Battle Over the Agency Model Begins, As Amazon Pulls Macmillan Buy Buttons
As originally reported last night and many readers know by now, sometime yesterday evening the buy buttons for apparently all of Macmillan’s books–including bestsellers and top releases, and Kindle editions–were removed from Amazon’s site. Macmillan books remain listed but can be bought only through third-party Marketplace sellers, while Macmillan Kindle titles all lead to pages that read, “We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site.” It is the first shot across the purchasing bow in big publishers’ efforts to reset ebook pricing above the loss-leader $9.99 price point and retake control over that […]
Amazon Removes Macmillan Buy Buttons
Many have wondered how Amazon would react to the biggest publishers’ efforts to challenge the etailer’s loss-leader price point for new releases in ebook form and move broadly to an agency model for selling ebooks, with Apple’s iBookstore but also broadly across accounts. And, as reported earlier, the speculation intensified after the WSJ played a video of Steve Jobs assuring Walt Mossberg that Amazon would need to sell ebooks at the same price as Apple because “publishers will actually withhold their [e]books from Amazon…because they are not happy with the price.” Sometime late Friday Amazon took the lead on withholding, […]
More On Barnes & Noble Stock, Sony Says Reader Sales Quadrupled
Meanwhile, on the continuing story of Aletheia Research and the Yucaipa Cos. toying with bookselling stocks, in the first three weeks of January (and especially on January 20), as Ron Marshall was closing his deal to run A&P and discussing his experiences at Borders, Aletheia bought another 268,000 or so share of Barnes & Noble. That boosts their stake to 15.71 percent of shares.SEC filing Deputy president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division Fujio Noguchi said at a press conference their Reader sales “quadrupled on a year-over-year basis” in 2009. It was the bestseller at their Sony Style online store […]