Comments on: Why did Amazon turn off buy buttons on Big 6 ebooks last night?

By: Issima Caldwell

Issima Caldwell — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 22:53:57 +0000

you guys owe issima caldwell big money and i want my money now

By: D Vernon

D Vernon — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:01:30 +0000

While it is certainly something that Amazon has done and would do on purpose, their internal systems are also simply not robust enough for the task they have at hand. I would be equally willing to believe that this was incompetance (rather than a “glitch”). Either way, it shows the danger of having too many of the industry’s eggs in a vindictive and systematically overwhelmed party’s basket.

By: Harry

Harry — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 22:26:07 +0000

David, get your facts correct…last Amzn qtr loss was first after 9 years.

By: David Thomas

David Thomas — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 22:03:48 +0000

Given that Amazon hasn’t had a profitable quarter in — I don’t know, five or six years? — and their major investors seem to go along with their plans of completely captivating their customers at the expense of profit, I don’t think they view such behavior as self-destructive.

By: Carolyn Jewel

Carolyn Jewel — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:45:21 +0000

For what it’s worth, the buy buttons disappeared for my Berkley (Penguin) and Grand Central (Hachette) books, but did NOT disappear for my self-published books.

By: Patty Brewer-Vergilio

Patty Brewer-Vergilio — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:14:17 +0000

Why would Amazon shoot themselves in the foot by turning off the Big 6. That is lost profit for them as well!

By: David Thomas

David Thomas — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 20:15:39 +0000

I’d say publishers who experience the wrath of Amazon where it really hurts — the profit margin — are the skittish ones. Insofar as the action was out of character — not really, they’ve done things like this and worse in the recent past. Nothing is too foul a gesture when there is producer surplus to be had.

By: David Thomas

David Thomas — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 20:11:01 +0000

While that’s generally good reasoning, it is sort of a tree-falling-in-the-woods argument. Given the breadth of the titles and publishers known to be affected, its more than likely that someone with a relationship to a book produced by Sourcebooks, Chronicle, or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt would have been alert to the no-buy button condition and squawked about it. Agents, in particular, watch titles like hawks to mice. If 100% of the chatter is devoted to big 6, the Amazon action likely was disproportionally devoted to big 6. Intentional or not, what this event should remind all is that e-book ownership is the issue the dealers, vendors, and consumers are dancing around.

By: Andrea B

Andrea B — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:41:33 +0000

back in March they also had a technical issue where all books went “unavailable” in the US for like an hour…
http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/27/2906570/kindle-store-us-outage

By: john holdcroft

john holdcroft — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:31:39 +0000

Amazon is fastidious about its devotion to the customer, so screwing the customer over (even for a day) by not allowing the books to be bought would have to be an extreme act. not saying it could not, or did not happen on purpose, but without a pattern or trend of the titles taken down, this is wild speculation. Are the twitterati and digital princes and princesses out there just immediately skeptical of any act from Amazon to prove our biasesof the Big Father from Seattle?