The Amazon/Macmillan Kerfuffle

So, in case you haven’t heard yet, there was a blow-up between Amazon and Macmillan. It only deserves mention here because it had a potentially huge impact on readers and authors: Amazon and Macmillan had a dispute over e-book pricing, and Amazon’s solution to this was to pull every single Macmillan book from their catalog, physical AND electronic. I.e., they basically said, “if we can’t play by my rules then I’m taking my ball and going home.” Since Macmillan is one of the big publishers, and a lot of buyers use Amazon, this would have seriously hurt both authors and readers with respect to the accessibility of many of the books we all love.

I don’t want to get into who’s right or who’s wrong, particularly since there are plenty of different sides to it. Some folks are mad about the high price of e-books and blame Macmillan for not wanting to allow Amazon to sell e-books cheaply. Others point out that Amazon wanted the benefits of being both a wholesaler and a retailer in the pricing agreement, and instead of trying to find a compromise, they took the schoolyard bully approach of trying to strong-arm Macmillan into caving.

At any rate, I know there are a lot of people who are now refusing to do business with Amazon because they feel so strongly about the matter. We’re considering whether or not to look into switching to some other bookstore’s affiliate program, and if you have an opinion, please feel free to render it in the comments. We do want to continue using an affiliate program of some kind, as it helps to pay for things like server space, bandwidth usage, and domain name registration. The attraction of Amazon is that they have so far carried pretty much everything, so I know that no matter what our readers want, they can find it there. However, if Amazon’s going to start using tactics like this, then that might not be the case any longer anyway.

It would be a pain in the butt to go through and replace all the Amazon book links with some other, but if folks feel strongly about it, we’ll do it.

Opinions? Thoughts? Who do you want to buy your books from online?

While I’m here, I should mention that it seems like my insomnia is getting better, so hopefully soon I’ll be reading & posting regularly again. In the meantime, I have a review from Renee to post today or tomorrow!