It’s right around the one year anniversary of the week that Amazon removed Macmillan books’ buy buttons in its snit-fit over the implementation of agency pricing, resulting in a lot of authors losing a week’s worth of royalties. And just in time to mark the anniversary, an interesting tidbit of information pops up on eReads. Richard Curtis reports that in a cover letter attached to the latest Macmillan semi-annual royalty statements authors have received, Macmillan CEO John Sargent makes note of an interesting adjustment to author royalties. Feeling that authors shouldn’t have to suffer on account of a battle...

Every week it seems something new is happening in eBookland to set the ebook cause back a decade or two. Always at the forefront of the reversal of fortune is greed. This week’s menace to eBookland is literary agent Andrew Wylie and his new publishing venture Odyssey. Wylie could have summed up his actions in simple terms: to disserve both his clients and the ebook-buying public. What, you ask, did he do? He agreed to give Amazon exclusive rights for 2 years to his authors’ backlist titles; Wylie will publish the books and exclusively sell them through Amazon. The backlist includes...

Macmillan CEO says of the Wylie deal, in his blog: I am appalled, however, that Andrew has chosen to give his list exclusively to a single retailer. A basic tenet of publishing is that our function is to reach as many readers as we can. We disseminate our books and the ideas within them as broadly as possible. I understand why Amazon wants an exclusive deal with Andrew. They have asked us too for exclusive product, as has every major retailer we deal with. This is smart retailing, and a great deal for Amazon. But it is an extraordinarily bad...

John Sargent of Macmillan has posted a new blog entry, in which he takes a look at four questions that cover the general gamut of the comments he received to his previous one. The first question Sargent addresses is how much an e-book should cost. He takes a look at several differing points of view—it should cost the same as a hardcover, it should cost almost nothing, it should be tethered at just below the price of the cheapest paper form—and concludes: In the end, an e book will be priced to reflect the...

Macmillan's CEO John Sargent attended the "Publishing Point" Meetup on Wednesday in NYC and spoke a little about the future of e-book lending, and the potential for publishers to create a new revenue stream from libraries. Eric Hellman attended the session and summarized Sargent's argument on his blog: "[E-book distribution by libraries] is a very thorny problem", said Sargent. In the past, getting a book from libraries has had a tremendous amount of friction. You have to go to the library, maybe the book has been checked out and you have to come back another time. If it's a popular book,...

I’ve found some good blog responses to John Sargent’s post about Macmillan’s agency pricing model, which we reprinted the other day. In his Kindle Nation Daily blog, Stephen Windwalker praises Sargent for at last addressing the general public rather than just the industry insiders at whom his earlier entries were pitched—even as he remains critical of Sargent’s message. I had been critical of Sargent previously for addressing his earlier comments only to authors and literary agents, and consequently trying to position them to speak up on his and his company's behalf, and this new...

Here is the complete text of Sargent's post on the Macmillan blog: After the events of the past several weeks, I have been in touch with many of you. It has become clear to me that there is far too little accurate information available in this time of unprecedented change. The issues we all face together are complex, and no news story or 140-character snippet can adequately address them. Therefore, I propose to write you occasionally, when I get a sense that there is a need for direct information. The first topic is the e-book agency model, and how it will affect...