Amazon takes 'buy' buttons off upcoming Hachette titles

Customers must now choose to be notified via e-mail when upcoming Hachette titles like 'The Silkworm' by Robert Galbraith (also known as J.K. Rowling) become available.

The battle between Amazon and publisher Hachette apparently isn’t over yet.

Amazon has now taken the Buy buttons off the pages for upcoming Hachette titles – including “The Silkworm” by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J.K. Rowling), the highly anticipated book that will be the sequel to Rowling's successful mystery novel “The Cuckoo’s Calling.”

As we previously reported, some Hachette titles such as “Alex Cross, Run” by James Patterson began showing longer shipping dates than usual on Amazon. Hachette said the delay wasn’t on their end – Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette spokesperson, told the New York Times that “we are satisfying all Amazon’s orders promptly” and that the company was delaying shipping of some of their titles “for reasons of their own.”

According to Publishers Lunch, Amazon and Hachette were negotiating “revised terms of sale.” Meanwhile, in 2012, buy buttons on Amazon performed a similar disappearing act – books published by the “big six” publishers were nowhere to be found for a brief time after publishers Random House and Penguin announced they would be merging. In 2010, buy buttons for Macmillan titles vanished after Macmillan went with a model in which the publisher, not Amazon, would set the price for an e-book.

Right now, Amazon customers can sign up to be notified when the Hachette titles, which also include “The Girls of August” by Anne River Siddons and “The Doubt Factory" by Paolo Bacgalupi, become available.

However, as noted by Publishers Lunch, if you already pre-ordered one of those titles, you should still receive it. Those who haven’t, however, are out of luck for the moment.