So, now that the buttons are back and it really does seem to be over, what did the Amazon – Macmillan war add up to?

According to an astute commentary by Paul Carr for the Washington Post, the “agency model” publishers are getting behind is the equivalent of the old net pricing agreement (Carr calls it the “net book agreement”) that used to hold sway in both the US and, more recently, the UK, and that still exists in much of Europe — a system whereby discounting is not allowed.

It’s a smart observation. But then he goes on to say that publishers are using it merely to prop up hardcover books and so it’s the end of the world. Apparently, the tens — is it hundreds? — of millions of people buying hardcover books are doing so because there’s a gun to their heads. Now, says Carr, “they’ll simply turn to piracy to get their fix.”

In a commentary over at Three Percent, Chad Post casts a gimlet eye at the catalyst that supposedly sparked the showdown: the announcement of the Apple iPad …

There are two elements driving the hope the big presses (Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Penguin) have in Apple: better terms than Amazon.com and the coolness factor.

The first is a pure money issue. Publishers hate Amazon.com’s $9.99 price (even though Amazon.com pays out to publishers at whatever price publishers set their e-books at, occasionally losing money on the sale of these e-titles in hopes of capturing a larger market while pleasing cheap-ass customers like myself who would never pay more than $10 for what’s essentially a glorified .doc file) and the fact that Amazon.com has all the control and gives publishers only 50% of the revenues from sales of the e-books (same as what they give for sales of physical books, but let’s all ignore that for the moment). Apple on the other hand is like a godsend to commercial presses: you can set your own prices! and Apple will only take 30% of each sale! This translates into $$$$$!!!!!

If only it were that simple . . . I don’t have the necessary data or mental capacity (at the moment, at the moment) to crunch all the numbers, but my guess is that getting 20% and jacking prices a bit doesn’t really end up resolving all the cash flow and cost issues plaguing publishers. It’s a help, definitely, but it only delays the inevitable realization that a model based in publishing more faster to outrun returns is essentially doomed when people don’t buy that many books.

Mike Shatzkin, meanwhile, in a commentary on his IdeaLogical blog, considers the place of that other big bookseller US publishers have to deal with, and how they play into the picture:

Barnes & Noble and the biggest legacy publishers clearly have an interest in slowing down ebook uptake. Even though B&N and the big publishers are now in the ebook business, their competitive advantage exists heavily on the print side. They recognize that they have to live in the ebook world to serve the authors and customers they’ve had for years, so they do. But I don’t think a single big player in legacy publishing could give you a convincing description of how they maintain their scale and power when digital becomes the rule and print the exception. Can that day possibly be more than 20 years away? Might it be 10? I know a man that will take a bet that it will be five.

Hmmm. Okay, so the whole thing wasn’t good for books unless it was. But in the opinion of this humble website, one very good thing happened that must be recognized: publishers finally agreed on something and came out — all right somewhat weakly — in support of one brave pathfinder, John Sargent of Macmillan. If publishers 40 years ago had similarly supported William Jovanovich in his stand against returns, or stood up to discounting, what a richer book and intellectual culture we’d have now. Somebody, buy that man a beverage.