Macmillan and Amazon War by Morgan Mandel

I've been watching with interest the developments in book price wars. This one is a battle between Macmillan and Amazon. Macmillan's demanded higher prices for kindle, when apparently $9.99 is the highest Amazon would go.

Amazon pulled all the buy buttons from Macmillan books and was only selling books offered by third party vendors, none bought through Amazon itself.

Then, Amazon gave in under strong protest and decided it would agree to offer bestsellers at $12.99 to $14.99, under strong protest, saying Macmillan had a monopology over its own books.

I'm not sure what to think of this. In a way, it's a good idea for Macmillan to decide and stick to a price. That means authors will get compensated for their hard work, as well as other people involved in production and selling of books. Also, it sounds like Apple will be charging more for Ibook material than the going rates at most books at Amazon.

I actually dropped the kindle price for Killer Career to $3.99 to stay competitive in the ebook and kindle market.

Will the insistence on higher prices help or hurt authors? That's the question. In this poor economy, it's a good thing for books to be readily available at affordable prices. Still, these prices have dropped extremely low. Some authors give away their ebooks or kindles, while others offer them at $.99 or $1.99 in the hopes of attracting volume sales.

Will readers buy at the higher prices? Are publishers like Macmillan pricing themselves out of the market?
What's your take?

Morgan Mandel
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com/
Killer Career available at http://digital-bookshop.com/ , at Amazon and other venues.