Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight
(Apologies for the formatting; I'm typing this on a netbook with a tiny keyboard.) — Last Friday, Amazon.com unilaterally pulled most or all of Macmillan's books from their online store. (You can still find them via afilliates …
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's removal of Macmillan titles turned an e-book pricing negotiation into a test of the retailer's control over access to readers. It followed Amazon's broader Kindle expansion, including opening the platform to third-party developers and extending its digital-text publishing platform beyond the U.S.
The immediate reversal—Amazon agreeing to Macmillan's pricing terms after the catalogue withdrawal—shows that Kindle's growing distribution role did not eliminate publishers' leverage over the books Amazon could sell.
First-order effects
- Macmillan gains the ability to have its e-books sold on Amazon at the prices it sought, while Amazon gives up its preferred pricing position in the dispute.
- Amazon's removal of Macmillan titles demonstrates that catalogue availability can be used as a negotiating lever, but the concession limits its effectiveness against a publisher willing to sustain the standoff.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's Kindle strategy must accommodate publisher-set e-book terms alongside its effort to make Kindle a broader platform for developers and publishers.
- Macmillan's outcome gives other publishers a concrete bargaining reference: withholding a catalogue can impose visible costs on Amazon's store as well as on the publisher.
Third-order effects
- The dispute points to a digital-book market in which control is split between retail gateways such as Amazon and publishers' control of catalogue rights, rather than residing solely with the device and store operator.
- If comparable negotiations recur, e-book pricing will become a central fault line in how platform retailers balance low consumer prices against suppliers' need to preserve control over digital editions.
The trend: Digital publishing is becoming a contest between platform retailers' control of distribution and publishers' control of the catalogues those platforms need.