Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object (Via Topless Robot)
It’s been fascinating to see the pissing war that’s been Amazon and Macmillan. If you’re an author and don’t know what I’m talking about, I recommend getting acquainted quickly. In short: Macmillan wants to do a ranged price of ebooks (new releases around $15, and older books much lower, like $6.) Amazon’s response was to remove all Macmillan products. Not just the ebooks, all the products. (The books still have pages, but there are no “buy now” buttons, you can get them only from third party sellers.)
There are many people who have better write-ups on this than I ever could. I recommend John Scalzi, Jay Lake, and Cheryl Morgan. If you want a one-stop shop for all the talk, you can’t do much better than Charles Tan’s Bibliophile Stalker blog.
The issue of ebook pricing is a big mess, I will fully agree with that. As a consumer and a kindle user, I love saving money. However as an author, I love having money to save in the first place. There’s a lot of arguing going on about the cost of ebooks, the perceived value, and money-grubbing companies.
But my main issue comes with the removal of the print books from Amazon. That was unnecessary. That makes everyone (incl. Amazon!) lose money, and it’s a **** move, akin to, “You don’t like how I play the game? Fine! I’m taking my ball and going home!” Also, Macmillan has written notes (Note 1, Note 2) to the public twice, both from the CEO, and Amazon released one statement, from the Kindle team, deep in the Kindle forums on Amazon. As I don’t know where I stand on the ebook pricing war, I do know that I respect straight forward talk and responses that don’t actively hurt authors, like removal of print books (many authors didn’t even have kindle versions, but they’re being punished too.)
This is an ugly war, and it’s been going on for nearly a week. I’m curious where it goes, but I gotta say, I’m not much of an Amazon fan right now. I did just learn about IndieBound, which seems to be able to support indie booksellers but also be a useful tool online. I’ll be playing with it more, and updating the links on my sites to show other options than Amazon. After all, I want my listeners to be able to buy Macmillan authors’ books. (Also, did you know that Barnes and Noble takes Paypal?)
(Full disclosure: I’m not a Macmillan author but I do draw a check from them as I blog and podcast for Tor.com. But my opinions are my own.)
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2 Responses to Amazon/Macmillan: The Great Kerfuffle of 2010
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I love the fact that you can have a book on Amazon, no matter how small your publisher. But this isn’t the first time that they’ve done something like this that makes us all cringe.
It was just a couple of years ago that they were threatening to delist every print-on-demand book but those published by their own POD service. I don’t think they followed through with that, but now it looks like the ebook is their new battlefield.
On a completely unrelated matter, any chance of an updated print version of Lessons from a Geek Fu Master in the near (or far) future?
The two places I talked/commented most about this are Tobias Buckell’s blog (and I think Toby has done a good job of trying to look at it objectively, even while pointing out he’s a bit ticked at Amazon for yanking his books) and Jamie Ford’s blog. I did a word count and discovered that between the comments on both of those blogs (and a couple on my own) I had written almost 6000 words on the subject… so I won’t clutter up ISBW with any more. Incidentally the books are all back on Amazon now (came back about a week after they were yanked).
(BTW, both blogs are just the author’s names + .com … not putting links in here lest I get spam-filtered for multi-linking)