I disagree that pricing is irrelevant to this battle. Pricing is the only reason they're having this battle. Amazon is trying to drive the prices down to $10 o

I disagree that pricing is irrelevant to this battle. Pricing is the only reason they're having this battle. Amazon is trying to drive the prices down to $10 or less because they believe that the eBook market will stagnate if titles are priced much higher than that. They're gambling that lower prices for eBooks will lead to higher sales, and that the increased volume will make up the difference for everybody. Macmillan is trying to drive the prices up so they can still recoup their fixed costs given current sales numbers for eBooks. They're not gambling at all -- they're trying to structure prices so if the eBook market stagnates they still break even, which has the very pleasing side effect that if eBook sales increase even slightly (something the iPad is threatening to help happen), all the revenue from those additional sales will be pure profit. I can see points on both sides here. I agree with Amazon that the eBook market is dead in the water unless eBooks cost significantly less than physical copies, but publishers like Macmillan would be insane to give Amazon any control over the actual "list" price that drives all the percentages. (Pricing rant: In order to succeed, eBooks have to be priced competitively with the actual street prices of the print versions, not the list prices. Bestseller prices need to be competitive with Amazon and Costco, and backlist prices need to be at least nominally competitive with used. Particularly for titles have have been in print for decades -- I think you're recouped your costs on the Foundation trilogy by now, guys; it's not my fault you keep re-typesetting it so you can bump up the page count to make the ever-increasing cover price look "reasonable".)