Until recently, Amazon.com had been able to set prices for e-books unchecked. Typically, that price was $9.99 for bestsellers.

However, MacMillan Publishers Ltd threatened this tidy cost when the company decided that they wanted to change the pricing of their publications. For a week, neither side gave in, and the “buy button” for MacMillan’s books was ineffectual on Amazon.com. On Feb. 5 around 6 p.m., Amazon gave in. All of MacMillan’s books are available on Amazon.com again, with a $4 bump to match $14.99 hardcover prices.

Amazon issued this statement: “We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all MacMillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept MacMillan’s terms because MacMillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.” This pricing model is the equivalent of mending a broken leg with a Band-Aid. “Here’s MacMillan, historically a very large powerful publishing house, confronting a new reality: that it can’t even set the price of its own books, that Amazon has hijacked that major decision point and tried to usurp from MacMillan the right to charge $9.99 a book rather than $29 a book,” Thomas McPhail, professor of media studies, said. “Then, of course, Amazon is doing this because it’s fighting off Wal-Mart and others that also are offering discounted electronic books. Other companies will certainly find themselves in the same predicament.”

According to Apple Insider, two other publishers (Hachette Book Group and Harper Collins) are now publicly on board with MacMillan’s agency model. However, though this model sets e-book prices higher, retailers like Amazon get a 30 percent cut of sales, and a multitude of other companies, including Penguin, still have not committed to it. The problem is that while retailers make more money and the publishing houses manage to set prices how they’d like, consumers are forced to monitor their e-book buying habits closely.