E-Book Wars
This week Amazon.com and big-publisher Macmillan had an arm wrestling match. Amazon lost. Kindle devices, already feeling like yesterday’s newspaper after the iPad announcement, briefly flashed a sad-face emoticon.
Here’s the story. Amazon wants to control (and keep low) the price of e-books (Sound familiar, iTunes?) But publishers don’t like being told what their books retail for, and who wouldn’t want an extra five bucks for every download sold?…
Macmillan threatened to pull titles from Amazon, so Amazon blinked. Although they expressed “strong disagreement” with Macmillan on their forum, Amazon agreed to allow higher prices for select titles.
I guess content IS still king.
(While everyone battles it out, we’re focusing on creating jaw-dropping multimedia “experiences” and apps for our author and publisher clients with these e-readers)
So is this good news or bad news? Who is the real winner?
