The Simon & Schuster agreement with Amazon brought a sigh of relief to some authors, who will not have to worry about it deteriorating into an ugly, protracted battle such as the one that still pits Amazon against Hachette on e-book pricing.
"I love both Simon & Schuster and Amazon, so I'm thrilled that war has been averted," said Walter Isaacson, the best-selling Steve Jobs biographer, who just released his latest S&S book, "The Innovators."
"I think [S&S CEO] Carolyn Reidy and [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos should now be made peace envoys to the Middle East so they can save not just publishing but the world," Isaacson said.
Under terms of the S&S-Amazon deal, the publisher gets back the right to set the prices on its e-books — a privilege that it has not had since 2010, when the Justice Department claimed that the big US publishers were guilty of collusion in setting e-book prices.
Five big consumer publishers paid multimillion-dollar sums to settle the claims.
Now the new deal restores S&S's right to set its own e-book prices.
The formula for selling ink-on-paper books that Amazon carries for S&S will not change appreciably.
That is still handled in a more traditional "wholesale model," whereby Amazon buys books from Simon & Schuster and Amazon is then free to set its own prices for consumers.
While consumers are not likely to see rock-bottom prices on e-books, there do appear to be some incentives for the publishers to make some price concessions.
"Importantly, the agreement specifically creates a financial incentive for Simon & Schuster to deliver lower prices for readers," Amazon said in a statement.
A lot still remains to be seen, including whether the Simon & Schuster deal can spur an end to the now six-month-old feud between Amazon and Hachette Book Group over e-book pricing.
One informal authors group known as Authors United is reportedly pressing the US to open up an anti-trust investigation against Amazon.
Amazon, at the start of the feud, stopped taking pre-orders on books by Hachette authors and stopped discounting prices, which hurt sales. The standoff is becoming a bigger problem for authors as Christmas book-buying season approaches.
There are still precious few details of the S&S-Amazon agreement in circulation. The old agreement was not set to expire for two months. The new agreement is said to be a "multiyear deal."
Reidy broke the news in an e-mail she sent to her authors on Monday,
"It addresses our mutual concerns about preserving the value of our intellectual property in the marketplace, as it is a return to a version of agency pricing that — with some limited exceptions — gives control of e-book pricing to Simon & Schuster, while providing us the flexibility to deliver great prices for readers," she wrote.
Hachette and Amazon, meanwhile, were not commenting on their battle. The three remaining publishers in the so-called big five — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins (owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post) and Macmillan — are all believed to be facing negotiations with Amazon on new deals in the months ahead.
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