A few days ago, I heard of a new battle brewing between Amazon and Barnes & Noble: Amazon signed an exclusive deal with DC Comics for digital rights to sell their comic books, and Barnes & Noble retaliated by pulling their physical books from their shelves entirely.  Their justification: If they are going to be cut out of the digital sales, they don't want to sell the physical comic books, either.

This is just part of an ongoing battle between the biggest retailers in the book business.  Ebook readers and the relatively unexplored market of ebooks have instigated many of these battles.  For instance, it was Apple that negotiated the agency pricing model with the 6 biggest publishers, wherein the publisher determines the price and the bookseller just gets a 30 percent cut.  (Compare this to the physical book model, where booksellers buy books from the publisher at wholesale and can determine on their own whether to offer sales, discounts, or coupons.)

Unfortunately, the war over ebooks seems to be for the right to not just undercut, but altogether eliminate the competition.  The battle over DC Comics is just part of that war, but it may end up hurting the industry, too.  Picture books and graphic novels have just started coming out in digital book form in the last year or so, since the iPad and the Nook Color made them more feasible, and I'm afraid that Amazon's exclusive deal with DC Comics -- one of the biggest publishers of comic books -- may slow the rise of digital comic books and graphic novels.