Amazon Removes Macmillan Books From Kindle Store

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One advantage of Amazon’s Kindle Store is the low, low prices of their eBooks. Book publishers aren’t happy about it, as they feel it is going to lower the value of their books. Macmillan Publishers, an international publishing house was reportedly unhappy with Amazon’s pricing scheme, and in retaliation, Amazon has pulled their books from the Kindle Store.

The New York Times, speaking to a ‘person familiar with the situation’ said that Amazon has been arguging with book publishers over the price of Kindle books since last year. Since most Kindle books are about $9.99 (as a Kindle user myself, I can tell you that most books are within $2 of $9.99 – some sources have reported that all books are $9.99 on the Kindle Store, al la iTunes, which isn’t true), reports have it that the publishers want the mean price of the eBooks to be pushed up to around $15.

Amazon declined to comment to the New York Times and Macmillan didn’t reply to the NYT’s request for a comment, so it isn’t clear if Amazon yanked the books or if Macmillan asked that their books be taken down. Fortunately, we haven’t seen any reports of Kindle users having their Macmillan books disappear from their Kindles. We know that Amazon has the ability to remotely delete books from all Kindles worldwide (as happened last year with Orwell’s 1984 – oh the irony).

Of course, the elephant in the room here is Apple, with their big iPad reveal this past week and the iBooks store that it has. It just so happens that Macmillan Publishers has signed on to sell books via the iBooks store, and we know that Apple (who has a history of negotiating with these content owners from iTunes) is willing to let the publishers charge whatever they want for the books.