Publishers Lunch reports that the three month standoff between Amazon and the Independent Publishers Group is over. Although IPG President Mark Suchomel declined to discuss the terms of the agreement Amazon and the IPG have reached, the fact that it took three months to reach it does suggest Amazon didn’t get everything its own way—but neither did the IPG.
The Publishers Lunch piece suggests that the dispute came down to the larger chunk of co-op fees Amazon wanted that also made several Big Six publishers balk.
IPG ceo Curt Matthews has written about the issues a number of times on the company’s blog. In April, for example, he wrote about how coop has "evolved into something entirely different : ‘Give us 4% of your last-year sales with us for co-op and we will do wonderful but unspecified marketing things for you. Otherwise we will take down all of your eBooks.’"
In a letter sent to the publishers the IPG serves, Suchomel apologized for the revenue authors lost during the three months their e-books were not on sale, and pledges that the IPG will forego its own share of all their e-books’ revenue from June through the end of August to help make up for it.
(Found via The Digital Reader.)
