Trapdoor Books

As a follow-up to my post on January 20 entitled Amazon Goes Nuts on Book Royalties, the next shot has been fired in the war between Amazon’s desires to sell Kindles by pricing all e-books at $9.99 and the publishing world’s desire to not lose money by selling e-books below cost.

As reported in the NY Times yesterday, we have Macmillan to thank for the salvo, as it pulled all of its titles from Amazon demanding that a 30% “agent” royalty schema similar to the one proposed by Apple for titles on the new iPad. On Friday, all Macmillan titles were available only through third-party Amazon stores.