No Saturday Sound Off today…. too much news to post about! Before I get to the explosion of ebook drama all over twitter today, I had saved up a few reaction posts to the Apple IPad I wanted to share. First – the IPad? Really? *sigh* I am an apple fangirl, but even I can’t swallow that name and say it with a smile.
Links of Interest:

Now that we have the initial Apple IPad reactions out of the way, let’s get to the ebook drama that exploded on the web last night and continued over to this morning. A condensed timeline of events:

So what does this all mean? For the time being if you own a Kindle, you can not purchase books published by any author under the MacMillan name. Additionally, you can not buy new copies of these books from amazon.com unless you are willing to go through secondary sellers.

Many seem to be jumping to attack Amazon.com for being a bully or throwing a tantrum, yet I want to point out, it seemed obvious from Steve Jobs’ comments that book publishers were getting ready to do exactly the same thing. Withhold books in an effort to get what they wanted, higher e-book pricing. Amazon simply beat them to the punch, instead seemingly taking the consumer’s side on this one and saying NO. That is not to say that Amazon is doing this for the good of you and me, lets be realistic…. they are all about profits as much as publishers are. They are just more in the know with how to make profits from Kindle users….. we buy more books when they are priced lower and easily accessible. Pulling the sales of print books in addition to kindle books may seem like an unrelated move, but we must remember that Amazon sales volume is their negotiating tactic in this.

Being a Kindle lover, I find myself siding more with Amazon on this. This issue ties in with my previous post about publishers making users wait for Kindle releases. Once again I find myself thinking, major book publishers simply do not understand their various customer bases. I will not pay 14.99 for a new release, even if the print is hardcover, to read on my Kindle. Not when they still come loaded with overreaching user agreements and the horrible atrocity known as DRM. If you give me an ebook that I can own, transfer to any device I want, resell, and be able to lend in some way…. then I will happily pay “dead tree book” pricing for that ebook. Until then, 14.99 or more for an ebook is overinflated and unjustifiable.

Have I spent that much on e-books in the past? Absolutely… for authors I love and don’t want to wait for. But those are rare instances and if all e-books were that price you would loose a great many sales from me. Especially when I can head over to Fictionwise.com and MBaM and get great authors like Moira Rogers, Keith Melton, and Josh Lanyon for far less than that… and without DRM. Lower priced e-books give readers the chance to try out new authors without worrying about spending too much, without risk! Publisher’s need to figure this out and run with it. I can not even begin to understand why they don’t have someone in their marketing department who does not see e-books as the death of the publishing! Author Carolyn Jewel nailed it on the head with this:

Publishers need to hire someone who actually understands technology. Someone who grew up with it or enthusiastically threw themselves into it when the world changed. And it did, people, it did. And then they need to actually LISTEN to that person. Any C-Level employee who didn’t personally take a look at Twitter when the buzz started is automatically disqualified from this position.

The sad part about this entire situation is that the readers and authors are the ones stuck in the middle and ultimately taking the most harm. Just as we readers aren’t able to buy books at a reasonable price from Amazon during this time, authors are going to lose a what I imagine is a large chunk of royalties from Amazon sales. Let’s all cross our fingers that Amazon and MacMillan find some way of working this out quickly.

Update

While I was writing this post, there was an update to this article about the situation.

Motoko Rich, my colleague, spoke with a person who had a direct conversation with a person at Macmillan familiar with the conversations with Amazon. Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same “agency” model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the retailer. Macmillan said Amazon could continue to buy e-books under its current wholesale model, paying the publisher 50 percent of the hardcover list price while pricing the e-book at any level Amazon chooses, but that Macmillan would delay those e-book editions by seven months after hardcover release. Amazon’s removal of Macmillan titles on Friday appears to be a direct reaction to that.

There now appears to be confirmation of this here.
Wow. *shakes head* I’m Team Amazon.

Other posts you may like:

• Update on MacMillan and Amazon
• Book Publishers…someone needs to give them a clue.
• E-book Excitement