Amazon Pulls Book Publisher's Listings; Ebook Wars Underway?

As of last night, Amazon stopped listing all books from Macmillan Publishers, referring searches to other sellers instead. According to the New York Times, this is because Macmillan is one of the companies that now has an agreement to sell ebooks through Apple's new iBooks store, and asked Amazon to raise the price of their ebooks from $9.99 to $15. An industry source told the Times that the de-listing is Amazon's way of "expressing its strong disagreement" with the idea of a price hike. Gizmodo suggests this is the first volley in an Apple-Amazon ebook war. Quoting: "It feels like a repeat of the same s*** Universal Music, and later, NBC Universal pulled with iTunes, trying to counter the leverage Apple had because of iTunes' insane marketshare. Same situation here, really: Content provider wants more money/control over their content, fights with the overwhelmingly dominant, embedded service that's selling the content. Last time, everybody compromised and walked away mostly happy: Universal and NBC got more flexible pricing, iTunes got DRM-free music and more TV shows for its catalog to sell. ... The difference in this fight is that Macmillan is one of the publishers signed to deliver books for Apple's iBooks store. They have somewhere to run. And credibly. That wasn't really the case with record labels, who tried to fuel alternatives to dilute iTunes power, and failed."

Comments

Re:Kindle v. iPad

[PCM2]

In my mind the only durability argument that holds at all is that in the advent of the total downfall of our civilization paper stands a much better chance than bits. But even paper wouldn't do very well if, say, we have a large-scale nuclear war.

No, there's another argument that holds water, and you made it yourself. One of the key benefits you cite -- "the ease of copying digital media" -- is not a given. If publishers continue to insist on locked-down DRM-encumbered formats, they essentially reserve the right to remove a work from "print" at a snap of their fingers. You can't read your one Adobe e-book; I'm sure there are other people who have lost access to entire libraries due to this same effect. This is not a limitation of digital per se, but of the choices publishers make around digital.