Amazon and Hachette announced a settlement this week in their long festering contractual dispute. I'm glad it's over. As I discussed in a NINC interview last month, the dispute evoked a lot of unnecessary ugliness in certain quarters of the indie author community.At the heart of the dispute was the Agency pricing model for ebooks, which meant it was a battle was over pricing and margin. According to most press accounts, Hachette wanted the freedom to set consumer prices and earn 70% list for its ebooks, and Amazon wanted to pay Hachette lower margins so it could fund deeper discounting. I covered the dispute back in May here at the Smashwords blog.
According to carefully worded statements this week by Amazon and Hachette - neither of which boasted of victory - Hachette will retain Agency pricing control yet conceded to certain unnamed Amazon demands that will incentivize lower pricing from Hachette.
It's not easy to pick winners and losers. As with most wars, even winners can be losers.
Here's my attempt to examine the winners and losers of this episode, along with speculation on long term implications.
More at the link in the title...