Amazon's Vanishing Buy-Now Buttons, Revealed

Weirdly, the case of Amazon's disappearing "Buy Now" button does, in fact, have something to do with Harry Potter. But it's more about accounting wizardry than the fun kind.

We colonials have mostly* been spared being unbuttoned, but on its British site, Amazon has been dematerializing the impulse buy-friendly buttons right and left when disputing with publishers over the vig for book sales. Amazon has not been cutting off its button nose to spite its face, though--they've been leaning on backlist items, not big sellers

The New York Times reports that it first happened with "Bloomsbury, the British publisher of the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. Before they reached a compromise on undisclosed terms, hundreds of Bloomsbury’s older, back-list titles lost buy buttons on the Amazon site in Britain."

Now Amazon is feuding with the British division of Hachette Livre, and hundreds of its books are no longer 1-click-able. According to Hachette Livre UK's CEO, Tim Hely Hutchinson, this was Amazon's idea of making an offer you can't refuse: they wanted more than 50 percent off the retail price, or else...be a shame if all those buttons had an accident, wouldn't it?

Amazon seems to be taking a page from Wal*Mart in forcing downward price pressure on its suppliers. So perhaps we can look forward to discovering a host of new Chinese authors on Amazon's e-shelves once some forward-thinking publishers clue in on where all this is headed.

*In the U.S., Amazon has been punishing print-on-demand publishers who won't use its in-house BookSurge. Again, they need a little more than half-off the cover price to make it, you know, worth their while. Those pixels don't rearrange themselves.

Saruman's Amazon's Tower photo courtesy of Seattlest Flickr poolster mraaronmorris.