Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books

Venturebeat.com was one of the first to report that Amazon had stopped carrying books by Macmillan both in regular and Kindle editions yesterday.

Brad Stone at the New York Times Bits blog has a theory:

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.

I'm not too sure how to feel about this; strangely enough, it appears that competition may actually work to drive UP the price of electronic books. Is that a good thing? I guess it depends on who you are.

And people thought Steve was the only one that played hardball.