For some reason, Amazon turned off the buy buttons on big-six publishers’ Kindle books for several hours on Thursday night. The problem began around 10:30 p.m. ET and seemed to affect only books from Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Hachette.
Reports coming in of Amazon removing buy buttons from titles by Penguin, Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, Harper, S&S. Any other pubs?
— Sarah Weinman (@sarahw) November 9, 2012
Amazon just pulled Nate Silver’s buy button. The Internet is going to explode. amazon.com/The-Signal-Noi…
— Evil Wylie (@EvilWylie) November 9, 2012
Digital Book World has a statement from Amazon: “The Kindle Store is experiencing a technical issue. We’re working to correct it.” According to some reports on the MobileRead forum, users were also unable to download Kindle titles that they’d already bought and titles that they’d added to their wishlists disappeared.
As of this morning, the buy buttons are restored, and it’s unclear what happened. It is also odd that, apparently, only big-six titles were affected. Some wondered if the problem was associated with agency pricing — were only publishers who set their own ebook prices affected? But that doesn’t make sense for a couple of reasons: HarperCollins reached new agreements with Amazon (and other ebook retailers) in September, following the approval of the DOJ’s settlement with HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster. Amazon has been discounting HarperCollins titles since then. And self-published authors set their own prices through Amazon’s KDP, but those books weren’t affected.
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