Amazon e-book Price Dispute

The manufacturer’s cost of printing and reproducing an e-book, spread over several thousand downloads, is about zero. If e-books catch on, legacy book publishers would sell more titles and more books, but not at hardcover prices! This sounds like that old music industry deja vu, all over again. Shame on Macmillan.

Excerpt:

AMAZON SHARES FALL ON REPORTS OF E-BOOK PRICE DISPUTE

By Dan Gallagher

3:26 PM ET Feb 1, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Shares of Amazon.com sold off Monday on news that the company has pulled several titles of a major book publisher in a dispute about prices for its Kindle e-book reader.

Reports over the weekend in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal said the company has removed several titles from Macmillan, one of the largest book publishers in the U.S., which had been demanding that Amazon raise the prices on its e-book titles above the $9.99 cap that has been the norm for Kindle titles on the site.

(Read the full article at MarketWatch)