Dive Brief:

• Amazon over the weekend reached out to authors published by the Hachette Book Group, and offered them 100% of e-book proceeds sold on its site.

• Amazon and Hachette are in the midst of a protracted and increasingly acrimonious contract dispute over e-book prices.

• The retail giant says it would help a resolution along by taking authors out of the middle of the fight, but the publisher and its authors dismissed the offer out of hand. 

Dive Insight:

Amazon’s behavior in this dispute is something of a wonder. The e-retail giant has gone from essentially withholding sales of Hachette authors’ books to offering them full freight in profits on their e-books. Amazon says it would take authors out of the middle of things and speed up a result; certainly the retailer has suffered some very poor public relations due to the ire of famous writers over the matter. But it appears that Amazon doesn’t seem to realize that it’s actually its customers who are “caught in the middle” of the fray.