A Peek at the McMillan/Amazon Dust Up
The headlines were odd. Amazon pulled all McMillan products from its books list? McMillan was unhappy with Amazon pricing? What is going on?
The bottom line is the McMillan doesn’t want you to be able to buy McMillan books via the kindle for $9.99. They want to force you to pay the same price for an ebook that you would pay for the paper copy. Yes, even though it costs nothing to sell more ebooks, and even though Amazon’s pricing would make no difference to McMillan, McMillian doesn’t want you to benefit from the cost savings of using digital technology.
I’m with Henry Blodget on this one. Up yours McMillan! Here is a link to Henry’s excellent post. But, TechCrunch reports that Amazon is “capitulating” to McMillan’s pricing demands. Put into words, Amazon is saying to McMillan - “Go explain this to your (former) customers.”
FOLLOW - Matt Ingram at Giga elaborates a bit more on the above argument. Here is the link.
2d FOLLOW - Kit Eaton at Fast Company thinks that Amazon is the bad guy here. I don’t agree with the argument, but I link to it here for those who are interested.
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:47 pm
worrying more about the purchaser. This will be the only method which i buy books anymore. All of the price ranges for brand spanking new hard cover books is expensive. That’s not really to yet talk about the obscene costs that they request regarding paperbacks. Score an additional success for company greed.
February 3rd, 2010 at 5:02 pm
I think the publishing industry will have to get used to the idea that their profit margins for middle man services are going to crash. It is just too easy to distribute digital content for free or near free. So it may be that McMillan is fighting a rear guard action doomed to failure.