Why I may be closing my Amazon.com account.

[adelheid_p]

Amazon has decided to pull all Macmillan/Tor books from direct sale on Amazon.com due to a dispute over e-book pricing. Here's as link to the New York Times notes on the matter. Note that they are listing these books as available from other sellers but not directly from them any more. I could see them pulling e-book sales but WTF!? They are punishing every author published by Macmillan whether they have e-books or not. How very Walmart-like of them. Amazon is using it's leverage as one of the largest, most convenient, and trusted e-commerce sites to basically beat down Macmillan over this. Anyway, I'm currently searching for an alternative place to host my wish lists and using up my gift card balance and closing my account if Amazon doesn't do an about face soon.

ETA: The following is a link to Macmillan's side of the story.

Comments

[mewsrissicat.livejournal.com]

... so what is the reason behind these strong-arm tactics? Why should they care about e-book pricing, really - the market corrects overpricing as a natural result of customer bias.

[adelheid-p.livejournal.com]

Without actually hearing from Amazon about it, this is just speculation but the article cited above does say that Macmillan is offering Amazon the same deal that it's using with Apple for the iPad. I think that Amazon would like to offer it's e-books at a lower price to get people to buy the Kindle instead.