Skip to footer

A publishing mystery: Amazon 'buy' button disappears

Was the temporary disappearance of Amazon's 'buy' button from books of major US publishers a mere techno glitch – or a kind of threat?

Amazon's explanation that its Kindle store was experiencing a "technical issue" struck some in the industry as "laconic."
  • By Husna Haq Monitor correspondent

It’s another installment of Sherlock Holmes: Amazon Edition. In the latest mystery to stir suspicion in the book world, Amazon’s buy button disappeared on its US website for several hours Thursday night.

The buy button disappearance affected the Kindle e-book versions of a range of titles, perhaps all, by the big six publishers. No other publishers were affected by the mysterious disappearance. The buy buttons returned within a few hours.

“The Kindle Store is experiencing a technical issue,” Amazon said in a statement described as “laconic” by bookseller newsletter Shelf Awareness.  “We’re working to correct it.”

Herein lies the mystery. Was it indeed a “technical” issue, as Amazon described it? Or, as many in the publishing industry believe, was it a deliberate action designed to threaten major publishers?

It turns out this isn’t the first time Amazon has experienced this particular technical issue. The most famous incident occurred in early 2010 when Amazon removed buy buttons for all Macmillan titles to protest the publisher’s adoption of the agency model for e-books which allowed Macmillan, rather than Amazon, to set e-book prices. During that particularly nasty books war, Amazon halted the sale of Macmillan titles on its Kindle store before ultimately backing down.

“I think everyone thought they were witnessing a knife fight,” Sloan Harris, codirector of the literary department at International Creative Management, told The New York Times. “And it looks like we’ve gone to the nukes.”

This time around things haven’t quite escalated to that level. Thursday night’s technical issue comes on the heels of a Justice Department settlement over e-book pricing in which three of the five publishers accused of conspiring to fix e-book prices agreed to pay consumers to settle the DOJ suit. The settlement was seen as a victory for Amazon, which was a target of the alleged price fixing scheme.

Perhaps more tellingly, the disappearance of the buy button also coincided with the announced merger of Random House and Penguin Group. That move would create the world’s largest publisher and provide a more united front against the growing power of retailers like Amazon.

The merger, wrote the Wall Street Journal, “will create a publishing giant that will have more heft at a time when the book business is being rocked by the rise of online retailers and e-books.” 

In other words, Amazon isn’t happy about this merger. So was the buy button disappearance a warning to publishers linked to these recent developments in the industry or was it a bona fide technical issue?

We’ll probably never know, but you can bet industry observers have their hunches.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to A publishing mystery: Amazon 'buy' button disappears
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2012/1109/A-publishing-mystery-Amazon-buy-button-disappears
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe