A week after it pulled all the buy buttons from Macmillan books — in retaliation for the publisher’s insistence on having a say in the pricing of its wares, and for agreeing to sell books on Apple’s iPad –and five days after its now-infamous statement on a Kindle message board that it would “capitulate” amidst the storm of outrage that resulted, Amazon continues to refuse to replace buy buttons for most titles published by Macmillan and its imprints, including Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, St. Martin’s, Picador, Henry Holt, Tor and others.

This, despite the general impression — largely because of the “capitulation” statement — that the war is over and Amazon lost it. A case in point is this Wired report by John C. Abell that says — in its lede, no less — “Smelling blood in the water after Amazon caved to Macmillan’s demand to stop selling e-books of their titles for only $10, News Corp Chief Rupert Murdoch says he too wants that deal.” The article goes on to say that the HarperCollins owner says Amazon appeared “ready to sit down with us again” and renegotiate the deal under which Amazon prices new e-book titles at $9.99. “We don’t like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99,” says Murdoch. “But I think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hard cover books.”

The missing buy buttons — not to mention company history — make clear that if there’s one thing Amazon doesn’t do, it’s “cave.” And it’s also inaccurate to say this was only about ebook pricing (it’s clear the timing was related to the Apple announcement as well).

But is it also inaccurate to say what Amazon’s doing is negotiating?

According to an extremely brief, early report from Publishers Weekly yesterday, as well as sources to MobyLives, Amazon and Macmillan are still in “talks.”

But as Carolyn Kellogg points out in a report at the Los Angeles Times‘ book blog Jacket Copy, Amazon’s concept of negotiating seems to consist of rather childishly and brutally fucking with Macmillan — to wit, not all of Macmillan’s titles have been disappeared. Amazon has re-posted one: Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah. However, as if to mock Macmillan’s opposition to its cut-rate pricing on ebooks, Amazon posted an incorrect price for Winter Garden‘s ebook edition, marking it up well beyond list to an extraordinarily expensive $29.99. Later, Amazon dropped the price to the still too-high $16.49. (As everyone must know by now, Macmillan wants to price its standard ebooks at no more than $14.99.)

That’s the ebook. For the print edition of Winter Garden, Amazon has made only the large print edition available.

“What exactly is Amazon.com doing?” asks Kellogg. Beyond the ethics of what the company is doing to author Kristin Hannah in order to send a message to her publisher and the publishing community at large, Kellogg reduces it all to the simple statement of “capitulation” — the only statement from Amazon so far in this whole mess — and asks an elegant and pertinent question no one else has asked so far: “Who authorized the message board statement? And will no one at the company come forward, as Macmillan’s Chief Executive John Sargent did, to address readers directly?”

It may be obvious why no one from Amazon is stepping forward to take responsibility for such nasty childishness. Folks who work at Macmillan, meanwhile, don’t even have to leave the house to get credit for their stance: As a Galley Cat report by Jason Boog notes, the mere mention of the publisher’s name during opening remarks at the Fifth Annual America Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute Program “elicited a standing ovation” from the crowd of 500 booksellers gathered there from around the world.

Adds Boog, “The ovation traveled around the Internet at the speed of Twitter as more readers, writers, and booksellers celebrated the gesture.”