Sunday, January 31, 2010

Amazon/Macmillan Update

The entire message can be found at the link.

Publishers Lunch: "To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community
Editors' note: This message ran as a paid advertisement in a special Saturday edition of Publishers Lunch

To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community
From: John Sargent

This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon. The books will continue to be available on Amazon.com through third parties."

6 comments:

Todd Mason said...

That certainly spites Amazon's face.

Todd Mason said...

By cutting off its own nose, or at least slashing its own nostril, I mean.

Richard S. Wheeler said...

What is amazing here is that Amazon's retaliation for what is a limited Kindle e-book dispute amounts to banning all Macmillan titles from its site (including dozens of mine). Amazon is tossing weight around like the monopoly it has become. It is a publisher's inherent right to price its product as it sees fit, and Amazon's response, banning all Macmillan products, should receive the attention of Justice Department antitrust regulators. Long ago, Standard Oil was behaving like that. Now it's Amazon.

Anonymous said...

Can a non-pro ask a question here? What does "extensive and deep windowing" mean? Or is that supposed to be "winnowing"?

Art SCott

Unknown said...

Must mean "winnowing."

Anonymous said...

I thought "Windowing" might be arcane publisher jargon. Instead it's what you'd expect from a publisher's website, given their current standards of editing and proofreading.
AS