When Apple introduced the IPad this week, rumors immediately started flying as to what this would mean for the e-book market, specifically Amazon’s Kindle.

Well, it didn’t take long:

Go to Amazon.com. Search for any publication by Macmillan, one of the world’s largest publishing firms. The Prince of Silicon Valley, perhaps, or Sarah’s Key. Or last year’s huge #1 bestseller The Gathering Storm.

Gone, mysteriously gone. We found Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, but his new novel Makers and his popular debut, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, have been removed. Robert Jordan’s entire Wheel of Time series of fantasy novels is gone, except for 2005’s The Knife of Dreams.

You get links to other sellers. But Amazon has stopped carrying them.

According to the NY Times, the issue is, as usual, money. Specifically, the money publishers CAN’T charge for their first run books, since Amazon insists on $9.99 as the maximum price. Apple, while keeping MORE of the profit from the sale, would allow publishers to set a higher price, thus raising the floor on what customer would see as the lowest price that new releases are worth.

I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBooks store.

This is going to get PRETTY interesting. Stay tuned.

Tags: Amazon, apple, ipad, kindle, Macmillan