Amazon fails again (more about the Macmillan flap)

I was going to comment more extensively about the Macmillan flap, specifically about Amazon's "ham-fisted" (their word) tactics, but the price of ebooks is much more interesting to me at the moment. I will mention, briefly, that Amazon retaliated against Macmillan by delisting from their site every title published by Macmillan and Macmillan's imprints, approximately one-sixth of Amazon's inventory. Not just ebooks. ALL their books.

Did it hurt Macmillan? A little bit. Did it hurt Amazon? Plenty. Did it hurt Macmillan's authors? Yes, a great deal.

Here's an excellent (and quite funny) blog post on how Amazon managed to totally piss off authors and their readers once again.

Amazon pisses off their customers

Here's a short quote from that post, to get you started:

Note to Amazon: Real people do not give a shit about your fight with Macmillan. Real people want to buy things. When your store takes them to a product page on which they cannot buy the thing on the page, they will not say to themselves, “Hmm, I wonder if Amazon is having a behind-the-scenes struggle with the publisher of this title, of which this is the fallout. I shall sympathize with them in this byzantine struggle of corporate titans.” What they will say is “why can’t I buy this fucking book?”