As of noon Saturday it appears that large numbers of Amazon's buy buttons for titles distributed by Diamond Book Distributors, which were turned off earlier this week (see “DBD Titles Pulled from Amazon”), are now active.  Buy buttons for both graphic novels and games (which were also affected, see “Game Publishers Affected by DBD Woes”) are included in the activation. 

 

There are still significant holes, but it’s unclear whether those holes are because the process is incomplete, or because titles not available from Amazon were sold out in the frenzy of buying started by the pricing errors that gave abnormally large discounts (see “Pricing Glitch Puts Graphic Novels at the Top of Amazon’s List”).   

 

Publisher clients of Diamond were being told to expect that most buy buttons would be active by the end of the day Friday, although by late afternoon yesterday it did not appear that the process had begun.

 

The initial pricing problems apparently arose due to a problem with the ONIX feed from Diamond Book Distributors to Amazon.  ONIX is a standard data format for publication data widely used in the book industry.  We were not able to determine the reason for the problem (Diamond has not responded to questions on the topic).

 

None of the publishers we interviewed over the past week knew how many of their books had been sold at high discounts or what the over-all impact of the events would be.