The fallout from Apple's entry into the e-book marketplace has already begun. As reported in the New York Times, Macmillan publishing, one of the largest publishers in the U.S. whose brands included the science fiction publisher Tor Books, has been pulled from Amazon over an e-book publishing dispute. Macmillan is one of the publishers that signed with Apple to publish their e-books on Apple's new iPad.
Macmillan has been pushing to raise the price of its e-books from Amazon's set price of $9.99. Amazon deeply discounts their e-books to encourage sales of Amazon's Kindle e-reader. Apple is expected to allow publishers to set higher prices for e-book sales which could cut into Amazon's strategy.
Expect an ongoing struggle between other publishers and e-reader distributors over the future of nascent e-book industry. It will be interesting to see what the effects of the more e-book distributors with different e-readers and e-book formats will have on traditional publishing.
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