Heretofor, I’ve been putting the following sets of “buy” links for books I review:

• in-print books and e-books: amazon.com and indiebound.org.
• out-of-print books: abebooks.com

Amazon.com and Macmillan (whose subsidiaries and imprints represent maybe 20% of US book publishing) have been negotiating rights and pricing on e-books. On Friday, January 30, 2010 Amazon removed all “buy” links on its site for *all* Macmillan materials, e- or paper. The situation is, as they say, “developing”, but as of Feb. 7th most Macmillan books still do not have their Buy links back, though Amazon has said it will.

You can find good coverage of this issue by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, John Scalzi, and others.

I’m not saying that Macmillan is the hero in this fracas. But Amazon.com is clearly not interested, at some level, in selling books — or in keeping my links to them moderately stable. Since abebooks is a subsidiary of Amazon, I’m tarring them with Amazon’s brush.

So, I have decided to switch “buy” links:

• in-print books to Powell’s
  
• e-books to Diesel eBooks
  
  
• out-of-print books to Alibris
  

I’m removing the indiebound links, frankly, because they weren’t getting enough traffic, and I don’t want to split up the traffic I drive. If anyone has a better idea, especially for OOP books, please let me know.