webby Wrote:Very interesting - thanks for the links.
It's true, Amazon's action seems childish and it unfairly turned the authors into pawns in the dispute with MacMillan. I don't defend that, not at all.
But I do still stand by what I said before - Amazon should be able to sell books in any format at any price they choose. Once the publisher has sold the product to the retailer, it is no longer their property and they have no business forcing the retailer to sell the product for a certain price.
It's a time-honored methodology, Webby.
When I was a music buyer for a major retail electronics chain (I won't mention names, but they use a big yellow sticker with blue letters), one of the record labels decided that since we wouldn't follow their heavy-handed suggestion regarding pricing, they would quit sending us promotional copies of their CDs/DVDs/tapes.
So, we quit featuring their artists in the in-store play lists, and only ordered a bare minimum of their CDs from them.
We did, however, purchase them from an alternative distributor (i.e. Navarre would gladly sell us product from the major label, for just a few pennies more than the major label charged us).
I do agree with you whole-heartedly, though...what a company does with product that they have purchased is not the seller's business. If McMillan cares what is charged for the books, let them open their own darned book store.