Amazon is being plenty dickish here; they are taking a loss on those $10 ebooks in order to corner the market; they want to drive Fictionwise & other ebook stores out of business.
Which doesn't mean Macmillan is anything resembling "good guys" here.
All the major publishers have delusions about ebooks; they want to price them with hardcover or maybe trade paperback, and they want to believe every ebook sold is a lost print sale *and* a jump to the evil file-distributing darknets which will destroy all their profits, forever.
None of them want to realize, people are buying less books period, in part 'cos they're reading blogs, which are free (and entirely legal), and the publishers aren't just competing with other publishers and the television for buyers; they're competing with slashdot and digg and reddit and twitter.
They don't know how to think about that, so they ignore it. They know that ebooks are a tiny market niche, so they're thinking of them like special editions with embossed leather covers: we'll just charge double for it, and whoever's willing to pay for that is our nifty-special-item customers.
(I like Baen. A lot. I want to club all the other publishers over the head with Baen's successful ebook business model.)
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Which doesn't mean Macmillan is anything resembling "good guys" here.
All the major publishers have delusions about ebooks; they want to price them with hardcover or maybe trade paperback, and they want to believe every ebook sold is a lost print sale *and* a jump to the evil file-distributing darknets which will destroy all their profits, forever.
None of them want to realize, people are buying less books period, in part 'cos they're reading blogs, which are free (and entirely legal), and the publishers aren't just competing with other publishers and the television for buyers; they're competing with slashdot and digg and reddit and twitter.
They don't know how to think about that, so they ignore it. They know that ebooks are a tiny market niche, so they're thinking of them like special editions with embossed leather covers: we'll just charge double for it, and whoever's willing to pay for that is our nifty-special-item customers.
(I like Baen. A lot. I want to club all the other publishers over the head with Baen's successful ebook business model.)