Amazon, Macmillan Start E-Book Price War, and Amazon Loses -- for Now

If you were on Amazon (AMZN) late Friday evening, shopping for Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto, Hilary Mantel's Man Booker–winning Wolf Hall, or the latest Stephanie Plum novel by Janet Evanovich, you might have noticed something fishy. The books were listed, but they didn't have pricetags. You could buy them, but only from third-party or used-book sites. That's because these books are all published by Macmillan, one of publishing's Big Six and the first company to fight Amazon's pricing of e-books. Amazon lost this battle, but it's going to be a long and costly war.