Printed from  Amazon wants three-year Kindle deals to squeeze
Apple  updated 08:15 am EDT, Thu March 18, 2010  Amazon, Apple
demanding best e-book prices  Amazon has escalated the growing
feud between itself and Apple by issuing ultimatums to e-book
publishers, inside stories from the industry claimed on
Thursday. The online retailer has allegedly been pressing major
publishers to sign three-year contracts that not only guarantee
Kindle books for the period but would prevent them from offering
a better price to Apple or any other e-bookseller. These
publishers could use the agency model and set their own prices,
the NYT noted, but only if Amazon was given equal or better
treatment.  At the same time, Amazon is said to be using its 90
percent market share of US e-books as a club against smaller
publishers. Here, Amazon has not only tried to insist on buying
books wholesale, which would let it set the price as it has in
the past, but has supposedly threatened to pull publishers'
books off of the Kindle store al