An official Amazon Customer Service rep has announced that Amazon and Penguin have reached an agreement on ebook sales. The message is buried in one of the myriad of threads complaining about the lack of newer Penguin titles in the Amazon store.I'm already seeing signs of the logjam of titles clearing: you can now pre-order Bullet ($14.82), by Laurell K. Hamilton (although if you hurry, you can still get the Hardcover for $9.99, where it was marked down during the standoff). Interestingly enough, this title (and a couple of others from the Penguin imprint Berkley) isn't sold by the publisher, but by Amazon; it looks like the new agreement is NOT an Agency agreement at all, but the traditional retailer agreement that Random House and a few others have stuck with. I don't see any Roc or Ace titles yet, but the ones from Berkley are only starting to show availability in the states and not all of those (I suspect they have to be manually updated, one at a time).
Book Description
The music came back up and the next group of little girls, slightly older, came out. There was a lot of that in the next hour and change. I liked dance, and it was no reflection on the kids, but my will to live began to seep away on about the fifth group of sequined children...
Anita Blake is back in St. Louis and trying to live a normal life-as normal as possible for someone who is a legal vampire executioner and a U. S. Marshal. There are lovers, friends and their children, school programs to attend. In the midst of all the ordinary happiness a vampire from Anita's past reaches out. She was supposed to be dead, killed in an explosion, but the Mother of All Darkness is the first vampire, their dark creator. It's hard to kill a god. This dark goddess has reached out to her here-in St. Louis, home of everyone Anita loves most. The Mother of All Darkness has decided she has to act now or never, to control Anita, and all the vampires in America.
The Mother of All Darkness believes that the triumvirate created by master vampire Jean-Claude with Anita and the werewolf Richard Zeeman has enough power for her to regain a body and to immigrate to the New World. But the body she wants to possess is already taken. Anita is about to learn a whole new meaning to sharing her body, one that has nothing to do with the bedroom. And if the Mother of All Darkness can't succeed in taking over Anita's body for herself, she means to see that no one else has the use of it, ever again. Even Belle Morte, not always a friend to Anita, has sent word: "Run if you can..."
Update (12:42PM): Looks like all the Berkley titles that had shown up earlier today as available to order are now back to being unavailable in the US. Including Bullet, above. A lot more books are showing up in the Kindle store; however, they are unavailable to US customers (including several that were available earlier today). Here are a few of the imprints that are starting to show up:
Berkley
Roc
Ace
Penguin
Dutton
Puffin
Putnam
Viking
And there are others.... Looking thru the lists, there are several books that I want to order (and several where I am tempted to get the Hardcover instead, since they are down to $9.99).
