Amazon's page for the ebook version of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight

Seemingly to hide from further negative press coverage of yet another button-disappearing act for which it got tons of bad press (see the earlier MobyLives report), Amazon.com chose the day of the Apple iPad release to put back the buy buttons on books from the Hachette Books Group, as Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reports in a Wall Street Journal story. But as Jason Boog notes in a GalleyCat report, Amazon also used the occasion for an undercover launch of a new thuggish policy: labeling ebooks priced under the agency model (as opposed to those subject its own drastic discounting policies) with “a new disclaimer — disavowing their role in pricing and sending a clear message to customers.”

At the page for the ebook version of Stephanie Meyer‘s Twilight, for example, Amazon has added rather prominently just under the title of the book: “Sold by: Hachette Book Group,” and beneath that, “This price was set by the publisher.”

As Boog suggests, Amazon may have gotten the idea from angry customers writing into its forums, such as one asking Amazon to “please identify under which model each ebook is sold near the buy button. The name of the publisher (top of the organization not a subsidiary) would be great also.”

Or, as MobyLives hereby suggests, things may be the other way around: the ever-demagogic Amazon seems to us to be running a rather adept astroturf campaign to whip up under-informed customers into a frenzy — the Meyers ebook, after all, is set at the very price Amazon has been telling its customers all ebooks should be set at: $9.99. (Indeed, a subscribers-only report by Michael Cader at Publishers Marketplace notes “Customers scared of price hikes under the agency model may find themselves relieved” by prices at the iBook store on iPads. “Of the top 15 NYT fiction bestsellers, under the new pricing model 9 titles are still at $9.99, with one book at $10.99, two at $11.99, and three at $12.99.” )

In any event, as Boog wrly notes, Amazon’s new policy of fingering publishers “appears to have resolved the technical ‘hiccups’ that kept Hachette eBooks off Amazon’s shelf for a few days.”