Late on Friday, alert readers noticed that all books published by Macmillan disappeared from sale without notice from the Amazon.com online bookstore. Speculation as to the cause started immediately, with questions whether this was a technical glitch or something else. The New York Times quoted an unattributed source late Friday stating that this was the result of a pricing dispute between Amazon and Macmillan, and this was confirmed by a Saturday morning open letter from Macmillan publisher John Sargent. By Sunday, Amazon had backed down, finally issuing an unsigned official communique explaining the situation and indicating that it would return the Macmillan books to its online catalog.

Today's links chronicle the situation as it played out to date, showing how Macmillan and its authors took the upper hand in crisis communications by being open and forthright about their motives. In comparison, most of Amazon's visible commentary on the issue came from customer service representatives and comment board moderators who were not as well spoken and who did not always have either first or last names.

Late Friday

Venturebeat's Paul Boutin and the New York Times' Brad Stone report on the mysterious disappearance of books.

Venturebeat

Go to Amazon.com. Search for any publication by Macmillan, one of the world’s largest publishing firms. The Prince of Silicon Valley, perhaps, or Sarah’s Key. Or last year’s huge #1 bestseller The Gathering Storm. Gone, mysteriously gone. We found Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, but his new novel Makers and his popular debut, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, have been removed. Robert Jordan’s entire Wheel of Time series of fantasy novels is gone, except for 2005’s The Knife of Dreams.

New York Times

I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Saturday morning

The Amazon customer service representative "Abdullah R." replied to a query with this message in electronic mail. A telephone conversation with an Amazon customer service representative did not add any information. A spokesman for Amazon was not available for further comment.

We are aware of this situation and this issue has already been escalated to our higher officials. I'm also forwarding your response to the concerned department, and I'll get back to you once I've information from them, but it'll take a bit more time than usual.

I just wanted to let you know I'll write back in 2-3 business days with more information about this. I understand that the delay might cause inconvenience to you. But, I assure you that I'll write back with a satisfactory response.

Saturday evening

Macmillan publisher John Sargent issued a news release in the form of a full page paid ad on Publishers Lunch, a trade publication for literary agents:

To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community
From: John Sargent

This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon. The books will continue to be available on Amazon.com through third parties.

Sunday

Author John Scalzi is not happy with Amazon.

By Sunday, those authors who were on Macmillan imprints who had a big enough fan base to make a difference had rallied their fans online. The person whose comments I read who had the right combination of wit, humor, and righteous anger is Campbell award winning science fiction writer John Scalzi, who lives in Bradford, Ohio, about three hours south of Ann Arbor.  Scalzi was in Michigan for the 2009 Pengicon convention.

Leaving aside the moral, philosophical, cultural and financial implications of this weekend’s Amazon/Macmillan slapfight and What It All Means for book readers and the future of the publishing industry, in one very real sense the whole thing was an exercise in public communications, a process by which two very large companies made a case for themselves in the public arena. And in this respect, we can say this much without qualification: oh, sweet Jesus, did Amazon ever hump the bunk.

Scalzi goes on to demolish Amazon's crisis communications strategy, noting point by point that the stealth delisting of books late on Friday alienated Macmillan's authors and the fans of those authors. Amazon let Macmillan have the upper hand by doing this without an announcement, leaving book buyers scratching their heads wondering whether it was "a terrorist act in which renegade Amish attacked Amazon’s server farm and poured jugs of hard cider into the machines, shorting out the ones holding Macmillan’s vasty inventory? "

And, in the end it was a question of Amazon ruining the user experience for its readers.  (Note: strong language in original; you'd write this way too, if your livelihood was caught in the struggle of corporate titans.)

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 ... book?” Because, you know, they are there to buy that ... book. And when you don’t let them buy that ... book, they aren’t going to blame Macmillan. They are going to blame you.

Monday a.m.

As of this writing, Amazon's corporate press release archive still has nothing on the topic. Techmeme has assembled dozens more bits of commentary and news reporting from around the net.

The extent of the Amazon official response is this unsigned posting by a member of the Kindle team on their internal forums, a post which has received 826 comments.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.

More quick perspectives, if you want to dig

Charlie Stoss on An outsider's guide to the fight. "Amazon are going to fight this one ruthlessly because if the publishers win, it destroys the profitability of their business and pushes prices down."

New York Times, Monday: Amazon gives in

Teleread asks if publishers are greedy bastards. "If Amazon looks like a jerk, the publishers are not looking much better. They continue to set e-book prices at or near the price of hardcover books, and often fail to bring them down for years afterward even when the books are being sold in paperback. And readers have historically not been happy about it, and muttered about all publishers being greedy bastards. It took Amazon’s decision to start selling e-books at $9.99 as loss-leaders to push its e-book reader to start to change that."

A note to bookstore executives

Books, for the most part, are not like soap or detergent. If one author's titles are not on the shelf, you are not likely to buy something else if you had your heart set on it. If Catcher in the Rye isn't there, you won't buy Catcher in the Wheat or a Yogi Berra biography.

Edward Vielmetti writes a weekday links roundup for AnnArbor.com. You can reach him at 734-330-2465.